[Twi]Chronicles of the Impaler: Crisis of Infinite Draculas OOC

[DoomITP]

Hey you guys! I read quite a bit of the story and it looks really fun. How does on get into this? Or would I have to wait until the next story came about?


Thanks!

[Draxx]

We're electing a new story-teller at the second, but as soon as we do, you'll have your answer. Normally, you just put forward your character and if it doesn't cause too many problems, it is accepted.
Be warned however, this is a big, cumbersome game that is somewhat ensnared in it's own history.

[doliest]

So, there were a few tentative nibbles in the 'Hey Draxx, we think that projects awesome, we'll help you' department. If you're still interested, I'm going to call you up on that.
Now, the main story will probably be mostly told by me, but there's plenty of side-stories that need to be told as well, and I thought I'd ask if anyone was interested. Yes, you've got total creative control, long as you don't contradict anyone else too much. I thought I'd get a renewal of interest before I started designating them.

Also something I'll happily join up with. Just tell me who to write and a general feeling of what.

I'd like to hold the right not to write anyone I've never read/watched/heard of for the sake of not screwing it up.

[Draxx]

Glad to count on you, Doliest. Anything you want to contribute is welcome.

And there's where it gets interesting. The overall story draws from several major story-arcs from the actual comics. But that's the over-all arc, and while that's going on, there are hundreds of characters who are not, to begin with, directly involved, but nonetheless contribute to the story.

So who are you interested in writing? I'd be very gratified if someone wanted to do either Gotham or New York (New York containing Spider-Man, Daredevil, Luke Cage and Iron Fist, and so on). If so, I can give you a run-down on a few of my ideas, and you can announce what you like and what you don't, when working on the self-contained arcs.

I'll write the big events, what the Human Liberation Front is doing, and everyone else can tell the rest of the story.

For something easy, I'm currently trying to figure out the Japanese Avengers. So far all I've figured out is that instead of the Hulk, they have Godzilla, and there is probably some sort of ninja on the team as well. Gendo looks after it, like Fury does for the West, and they have a lightning god, since every government sponsored team has a lightning god. Anyone want to help me fill in the others?

[AnimeKid]

If at all possible could maybe a few of my characters be used? I mean like Fayt, then again if Kingdom Hearts isn't getting involved it would probably be hard. Well I know that KOS-MOS is on earth and basically functioning as super hero while she waits out millions of years for her time to come around again.

Heck Gen is a part of Jacobs werewolf tribe, feel free to use him. I've steadily trying to make more and more impact on the games. So far seems like the only real impact I've had is having Dedede kill Kirby.

If I'm rambling or thinking about something completely different, like the stories about the Seaton or something, feel free to ignore me.

[Draxx]

These games tend to be rather rambling and inconsistent, despite our efforts, so I'll be doing quite a bit of stream-lining to try and make it more comprehendible. And unfortunately, that means cutting down a lot of the stuff that's extraneous to this particular story.
This is mostly a comic book style story, so no, Kingdom Hearts isn't being used. But nonetheless, I'll make sure you get as many references as I can.

[doliest]

Glad to count on you, Doliest. Anything you want to contribute is welcome.

And there's where it gets interesting. The overall story draws from several major story-arcs from the actual comics. But that's the over-all arc, and while that's going on, there are hundreds of characters who are not, to begin with, directly involved, but nonetheless contribute to the story.

So who are you interested in writing? I'd be very gratified if someone wanted to do either Gotham or New York (New York containing Spider-Man, Daredevil, Luke Cage and Iron Fist, and so on). If so, I can give you a run-down on a few of my ideas, and you can announce what you like and what you don't, when working on the self-contained arcs.

I'll write the big events, what the Human Liberation Front is doing, and everyone else can tell the rest of the story.

For something easy, I'm currently trying to figure out the Japanese Avengers. So far all I've figured out is that instead of the Hulk, they have Godzilla, and there is probably some sort of ninja on the team as well. Gendo looks after it, like Fury does for the West, and they have a lightning god, since every government sponsored team has a lightning god. Anyone want to help me fill in the others?

Gotham would work better for me than New York; both because I have a fetish for Noir that anyone who's ever let me DM in person can attest, and because I'm more of a DC boy than a Marvel one.

[Draxx]

Rightio. I hope you understand exactly what you've brought upon yourself.

Now, naturally we have the Batman and his extended family. Nightwing, Barbara Gordon and Batwoman, Tim Drake and Damien Wayne, Cassandra Cain and Stephanie Brown, and Alfred Pennyworth. As well as Huntress, Catwoman, Jean-Paul Valley, all the maniacs tucked in their beds in Arkham, you know the score. You don't have to use them all, indeed most of them can probably stay in the background even if you decide to, but if you do, try to use a version that people are familiar with. And if you must use the ‘new 52’ (and god knows why you’d want to), at least try to keep the good old stuff as well. Throw in a few references to the people they share the universe with, (Watchmen style), but don't let the focus slide too far. Since this is a blend of anything, you can toss in other characters if you want, from the movies or the animated series or whatever. Hunter Rose/Grendel would be interesting as a former antagonist now permenently in traction, for example.

Now Gotham is more or less the same as it is in DC universe, the third worst, most crime-ridden and corrupt, poverty-stricken city in America (after Basin City, and Hub City). Wilson Fisk doesn’t believe it’s profitable to go there so isn’t muscling his way on top of it, there aren't a lot of people with real super-powers, there's gargoyles everywhere and the conditions are all more or less the same. I'd suggest you throw Frank Castle into the mix as well as the rest, maybe now mentoring Jason Todd as a surrogate teacher on how to fight crime, but that’s up to you. If there’s anyone else you want to toss in, it’s probably alright, but try and be reasonable. It’s still Gotham’s story, afterall.

I'm not a huge Batman fan, but I'll start you off as to what to tell the story about. Remember, it's ultimately about the fall of the bat. It's about what finally ended the mission. Which begs the question, what is the fate of Bruce Wayne? And what does his destruction cause? The classics are, of course, the Terry McGinnis interpretation, the Dark Knight Strikes Again interpretation, and the idea that one of the Robins will be his successor. But none of them really fit the tone of this story, so lets forget them. What could destroy Batman? Not simply martyr him, but kill him? Kill an idea? He has enemies who could do the job, but a character of his stature deserves a little dignity.

No, to destroy Batman we don’t want to show how bad some other villain is, or just knock him down against an alliance of his classic foes. We want to give him something meaningful. So let's deconstruct him, peal him back to his most basic. He's a focused and driven man, who in order to create a world where the tragedies that happened to him will never happen again, has become a cause. He is always prepared, he never gives up, and he never kills. At least two of those are going to have changed by the time we are done.

As for a main antagonist, I suggest using Ra’s, although 'The Hand' from Daredevil might work as well. I’m afraid Bane is back in the Suicide Squad (coming soon!), and nobody else is quite enough of a physical threat as well as an intellectual and moral one to really hone it. Plus, Ra’s is a big enough player in the overall story so it doesn’t feel like Batman is a side-character. So what, why and how would Ra’s do it? Remember, this should be a moral battle. Batman should struggle with the idea that the only way to stop Ra's is to kill him, to betray everything he's worked for, and Ra's should focus on his own mission, not just on killing his enemy.

Why is this happening? Perhaps Ra’s has found another heir. Someone else he wants to hand over the reigns of his crusade to. And so perhaps he is destroying Gotham either to tie up loose ends, or because he sees it as proof of the utter failure of human society and intends it as a cull. He’s hardcore enough for a thousand motivations, that's not really important. What is important is how it goes from there.

Now how would he go about doing it? Would he take away Batman’s allies, one by one, using seemingly unconnected events that all lead, slowly but surely, to his palace in the middle east, drawing Batman to a place of his choosing? Or would he prefer a swift, surgical strike, robbing him of all his resources and contacts? That could be very interesting, we’re so used to Batman as a crazy prepared guy with unlimited resources in the same location every time, that seeing him confronting Ra’s in a ruined city without anything to depend on but his own wits might be very interesting indeed.

While you’re chewing on that, let’s get to the basics. The Human Liberation Front isn’t interested in Gotham as such, since they don’t see Batman as a problem (or threat), and it’s essentially his city. What they are trying to do is raise the stakes, forcing superheroes into a more and more untenable position, and eventually start a war, using registration (don’t worry, civil war won’t happen anything like you remember it) and other fear tactics to turn the public against their heroes. Of course, it’s a self-destructive path, and they’ll wipe themselves out as well in the process, but that's beside the point. So here’s what I’d suggest:

Begin with the classic, a couple of mooks attempting something minor, before Batman or one of his comrades arrives and sorts them out. Something known and familiar, that fits into the groove of a million Batman stories that have preceded it. Then hit us with something unexpected, that reminds us that this isn't just a Batman story. Hit us with something overwhelming, that tosses us right into the point of no return, that puts him on the backfoot and keeps on pushing from there.

Then hit us with the villain of the story, and begin the momentum that will lead to a catastrophic confrontation.
At least, that’s how I’d do it. Hope it gives you what you need to start things off.

[doliest]

Scrapped together a basic 'intro' to the events to maybe highlight how I want to handle things; namely, not directly from Bruce's perspective. At least not completely. A 'tales from Gotham' style look at the events, maybe. This would obviously make capturing any 'final confrontation' difficult, but I think I can swap to Bruce for that. But preferably not until- Gotham is a character, and so too must be her children. Some known, maybe a bit from Gordan, maybe a bit from a Robin. But a lot of bits from Joseph nobody or Jillian who. Just people there to watch the events unfold.

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Joseph Splats sighed. He wasn't the kind of man who sighed often; a sigh was a sign of weakness. You couldn't sigh in Blackgate prison if you didn't want to end up as someones' wet nurse. You couldn't sigh in Blackgate if you wanted to hold your place; didn't matter that you could poke a hole in Two-Face's crazy a** plan or when Croc decided he wanted to eat a guard no matter how much trouble it got you in. You sighed at that, you ended up an example. Joseph Splats was no example. Never had been, never would be.

One hand turned the radio dial while the other hand shakily poured whiskey into a glass. Chipped. Oh well, it had been free. Joseph Splats had seen over five years in Blackgate. He'd worked alone before being caught. Couldn't survive alone in Blackgate without belonging in Arkham. The Radio crackled to life; And here listeners, the first song to reach from Gotham streets to national charts, a little melody about our favorite 'ahem' urban legend, Batman. This is Deadman Crews' 'F*** Batman,' He'd heard that one. Pretty good, though he never really liked rap; something about crooners just spoke to him. He looked up at the moon- near full, just a little missing. Good night for him; between the lights below and the moon above, he had a good eye around the building.

He leaned back, the mildly elastic plastic of the age-old plastic chair creaking as it was forced back onto the job. Heh. Funny; he could sympathize. He picked up his binoculars, a few streets away and seven stories down to the closest Gotham PD precinct. Busy. Cars buzzing about. He'd been held there after his arrest. Officer Williams; most cliché name he'd ever heard of, but a nice enough guy. Didn't give him any more bruises then he had too. Heard he'd been killed by Joker- hadn't deserved that. No one did. 7: 58.

He checked his ammo box. Couple hundred bullets last he checked. Some armor piercing rounds; enough to hopefully put down anything big. Not that he was expecting big; no, that wasn't the shape he was expecting at all. Too easy. 7:59. He'd never met Batman. A lot of the people in Blackgate had, but Joseph Splats had been lucky. Ordinary cop took him down, he'd been sloppy at a robbery and the cashier managed to get the silent alarm. He'd never even noticed. He'd heard the entire store burned down two weeks after he was arrested.

8:00. He raises the binoculars to his eyes as sips from whiskey glass. He sees explosion a split second before he hears it. An ear shattering roar as flames shoot out of the building and bricks are sent in every direction. Cars are bombarded by the explosion, by the flames, by the debris. Joseph Splats had never worked with any of the Rogues outside Blackgate. He couldn't say if this matched one of their patterns in the world beyond the prison walls. He had certainly never even considered working for one of the real psychos, the kind who went straight to Arkham.

He put down the Whiskey and gripped his rifle, his knuckles turning white. Few of the guys in Blackgate had mentioned it, told him things where changing as he left. Told him to watch out tonight. He'd known them well enough to believe them. He was ready- tall building, good view, enough supplies to last. Close enough to other buildings for him to play Prince of Persia with the rooftops if this one caught fire. A rifle he knew how to use. He was going to be safe. Hell, he'd made sure to get a building with decent tenants. Should be grateful for this.

[Draxx]

Excellent work, Doliest, though I'd expect no less. Really captures the feel of the cowardly and superstitious lot who inhabit Gotham. I christen it 'A day in the life of a minion'. Really interested in how it turns out.

Suicide Squad #1: My Country Right or Wrong

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He tugged lightly at the cuffs of his impeccably tailored double-breasted power suit as white as snow, with a bright, Kryptonite-green tie, then ran a hand over his smooth scalp, his aristocratic, patriarchal features, currently set in a slightly patronizing smirk. He was starkly handsome, but his features had a pinched, arrogant quality to them, and there was a faint scar on his lip that made every smile a sneer. He wore his age gracefully, he was in his mid-forties but sleek and fit enough to be an international athlete. And he was amongst the most recognizable faces on terra firma. As a businessman, he made close to five hundred dollars a second, which meant if he saw a hundred dollar bill lying on the ground, it wouldn't be worth his time to pick it up. And as president, he had an 89% approval rating, bi-partisan congressional support and the admiration of most of the world. He'd achieved more than enough for any man, and yet it would never be enough. The entire world wouldn't be enough for him.

He sits at a minimalist modern desk writing out notes in short-hand, his hand-writing neat and regular. Though the room has some of the most advanced holographic technology available that he had designed and installed himself, he prefers a pen and paper, a contradiction, perhaps, but one he is comfortable with. The room he is in is empty for a single door behind him and one window five feet and a half from the floor in front of him. Outside the window, one can easily see snow falling towards the ground, and a skyline reaching for the heavens, but nothing standing as tall as he did, hear on the highest floor of Luthor towers. There is a framed TIME Magazine cover photo of the occupant on the wall, alongside pictures from Lex's life. Volunteering with the Peace Corp, his relief aid in Louisiana after Katrina, not to mention various accolades and awards for his progress in the many fields of scientific endeavor. A Nobel Prize sat modestly next to some less prestigious awards along a shelf. Finally, there was a giant bookshelf of engineering and psychology manuals. And that was all. The entire office was too plain, barren, obviously the workplace of a man who had other priorities than business, but the occupant does not mind. What he does mind is being interrupted as a heavy-set, dark woman open the door. “Your appointment isn’t for another three hours. So what is it that you want?” He says, barely looking up.

"We're not meeting at the Oval Office, I notice." Amanda Waller replies blandly. One got used to being patronized and offended when they spent any time with Lex Luthor. He was extremely charming and charismatic when he wished to be, but there was a maniacal edge to him that was extremely discomforting. "Got something to hide? And where's your toady Gyrich?"

"Too many eyes at the office." Luthor replied with a small smile. "Too many people listening in, and rather then the tiresome process of separating who to trust and who not to, I decided to do away with them all and sort this out here, since what we're going to discuss is not simply confidential, but completely between you and I." He folds his arms. "Hence Luthor Towers." Luthor Towers were the biggest thing on the skyline in this hemisphere, aggressively modern and futuristic to an almost exaggerated extent. He'd designed them himself, and had spared no expense when building them. Everything was state of the art, where it wasn't nonreplicable technology that only existed here. Which made the all but empty office seem surprising, considering the space cost him ten thousand dollars a square inch. There is no art, or decoration, or anything but stark whiteness broken by an uncharacteristically modest list of achievements. The reason, of course, was simple. This was for nobodies benefit then his own, it was a sanctum where he came to concentrate, not gloat over his past successes.

"And what is it that has you so worried?" She asked, suspecting she already knew where this was going.

"The belated realization that if history were to repeat itself and the Authority, or another faction like them, decided to elect themselves and take supreme executive power, the government still has absolutely no means of stopping it. Perhaps I'm paranoid, but I do not have any intent to spend the rest of my life answerable to any conscience but my own." He replied, with a small, smile, that told her she was acting exactly the way he had anticipated. A muscle in her jaw twitched.

Waller stared at him thoughtfully. "That part of our history always gets mis-represented. Approval ratings were at a record low after Prez Rickard finished his term and things went bad again. By the time of the coup, only fifteen percent of the population even bothering to vote. Despite all efforts we were barely able to function, let alone compete with the Warsaw Pact nations, and there was talk of secession, if not actual revolution. And what did Patrick Kent do? Made things worse. Pulled strings to get his cronies from his days in the KKK into congress, tried to overturn civil rights laws for the sake of 'emergency wartime powers', and tried to silence the press when they found out about all the things his publicity people were desperate to bury about his past. And those were his good qualities. Perhaps you don't remember, up here in your ivory tower, but things were getting pretty bad. Enough to make you wonder if deciding leaders based on a popularity contest really is the way to go. We might be on the verge of war with the Soviet States, but they all live far better then we do ruled by an unaging all-powerful demagogue. All they really did was execute a criminal and utilize some emergency powers to get us back on course. Somebody had to step in, and nobody else did."

Luthor's smile became a little thin. "They executed him without a trial, and compounded it by stepping into a position of authority that they had no right to." He replied promptly. "I never figured you for a supporter of that sort of totalitarianism."

"I'm not. I just want you to keep things in perspective." She replied. And it was true, although her immediate superior in Checkmate Maxwell Lord had been uncharacteristically all for it, even using his influence and abilities to smooth the transition of power and make sure that there was a minimum of fuss when the Authority had taken power. And Maxwell was not a fan of metahuman supremacy.

"Well perhaps I need it, since in actual fact, I was not on the planet at the time." He replied smoothly. "It's a matter of public record that I left this planet, indeed this entire solar system. It's a long story, but not an overly complex one. Suffice to say I felt a need for a journey, to explore more of the universe that so overwhelms me, so I undertook it. I intended to start anew and set down new roots. But earth was my home, and I returned." Igniting the atmosphere of the planet that had adopted me and leaving it a charred, smoking wasteland, he didn't add. Nobody needed to know about that. And nobody else did, or ever would.

It had been six years ago. The Authority had stepped in, and he'd had enough. He safeguarded his company, leaving it to be his legacy on his home-world, then decided on a fresh start, and turned his satellites outward. Looking at the scans, he chose a distant, uncivilized world of humanoids that were close enough to human for him to be comfortable amongst, orbiting a star in another spiral arm of the galaxy.

Their culture was rude, their accomplishments non-existent, their lives ugly, brutal and short. They'd needed a savior. And so he'd come, and taught them... well, everything, lifting them above their nomadic lifestyle into the dawn of a new era, of prosperity, of knowledge and of civilization. With his guidance they'd built cities, tamed rivers, learned to farm and mine and so much more. Within three years, they were building universities, they'd learned poetry and had developed entirely new strains of music and art, and in half a decade were in the process of a cultural renaissance no longer completely driven by him, and were just past the cusp of industrialization. He couldn't even take all the credit, he'd shown them the way but they were forging ahead on their own efforts as much as his. They'd had potential.

One of them who had managed to please him sometimes became his wife, her name was Ardora as he recalled, and the two of them had a son. And as for the people, they'd all but worshiped him as their savior, begged him to rule them, built statues to commemorate his generosity, wisdom and accomplishments, even naming their planet in his honor.

…And it had all been hollow. Not the triumph he had intended, not the fulfillment of his potential. So… predictable. No, it hadn't satisfied him. It almost sickened him, abandoning Earth and the challenges it offered was a weakness, and everything he did was tainted by that. On Lexor, there could be no triumph. So he'd done away with his failure, erased all trace of it, and then returned home, where he had resumed his true destiny that he had written himself, all the stronger for his experiences. Mankind needed a savior, and that savior was him. This he knew, and had always known.

"As to perspective, what is that? You can't measure it. You can't hold it in your hands." He adds, changing the subject. "There are facts, and there are people's interpretations, but no amount of disassembling can alter things. Perspective is simply the veil of ignorance, the delusions that victims allow themselves. But regardless, we are arguing schematics. Do you agree to the dangerous times we live in, and the necessity of adapting to them?" He didn't give her a chance to answer, getting to his feet and walking over to his window. It was the highest point a man could stand in this hemisphere, one hundred and ninety stories up he looked down at his city from this point. "I consider myself a futurist. My concerns have always been bringing mankind closer to its manifest destiny, rather then simply perpetuate conditions as they are and do my best to profit from them."

Waller pursed her lips. "Very noble, I'm sure. But forgive me if I'm not sure I trust you to know what's best."

"We don't need to look at the future. We need to look at the past. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, Waller. And one way or another, we still have no adequate defenses to counter extreme metahuman abilities." Luthor said. "Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. Even if we assume that everyone plays by the rules, we still have an enemy ruled by the most powerful being on the planet across the ocean. And war is on the horizon, we need to be prepared."

Waller tensed. Her shoulders were a knot. She'd been expecting this. "And what exactly am I to do?"

"Create effective counter-measures against both our enemies, and our friends. If we have no adequate defenses, build them. Employ anyone you need, power brokers, politicians, criminals and black-ops mercenaries, whatever else humanity needs for it's last hope."

"Aren't you being dramatic?"

"Consider. These so-called 'heroes', received or honed their powers and talents, and began using them. Not so surprising, talent wants to be used, and there is nothing more tragic then a wasted potential. Why shouldn't they attempt to use it for the benefit of human society as a whole? Unfortunately, only a few of them had any idea as to their actual capabilities, setting themselves up as would be Übermenschs or Messiahs, both trying to either inspire or cow the world into their image. So some stop banks from being robbed while others try to rob them, some ruffle the feathers of international crime syndicates while others take charge of them and twist them into something worse, playing with the laws of reality, and so on. But they don't solve the problems. They simply raise the stakes." He turned to look at her.

"And so the criminals upgrade, the gangs retaliate, and the earth becomes a center of attraction for various cosmic entities, drawn by both factions. The world is a chaotic mess, a tide turned only by a thin line of unnaturally powered civilians in bright costumes. Our defenses are slowly being corroded away, replaced by people who had no idea what they were doing, and few people realize this."

"Now even you know that you exaggerate."

"You know I do not." He says, folding his arms. "But if you prefer, then let us discuss the fact that almost all of Asia is communist and most are part of the Warsaw pact. That France and Germany are all that is left of independent Western Europe. That most of Latin America is the same. Our list of allies grows few."

"And you think... what? That we need to do away with them all?"

"I suspect it's too late for that. But it is time to take back the reins of control, and put them back in the hands of those they were intended for. Can I rely on you?"

Amanda Waller let out a defeated sigh. "You know there's no need to ask."

There we go. Next? Suicide Squad is assembled.

Midnight Sons #1:Law and Order

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The Powers law enforcement division would have been a joke, if anyone at all could find such a gross and incompetent mishandling of such a volatile self-perpetuating situation amusing. It had been first formed in the 90's, or the age of cynicism as it tended to be called, however when the issue of funding came up neither the federal or local sections were willing to offer up more then a token support, and given that to function it would need more then every conventional division combined it remained critically under-funded, under-staffed and under-supplied. You'd think that from there, the only way to go was up. You'd be wrong, when it dwindled even further, until even in most key cities there was nothing more then an office, that was safely cut out of proceedings, given no support and ignored. About all they did was keep records, sign warrants and and act as advisors when incarcerating the more dangerous enemies.

There were reasons for this. Vigilantes and government agents who amounted to the same thing had, for the most part, managed to keep the world from ending with a minimum of collateral damage, and making a separate division to deal with crimes involving the paranormal had always seemed a pointless distinction to make. Did it really make a difference whether a man robbed a bank with a gun, or with his own salient abilities? Not as far as the law was concerned, and if the latter was hard to apprehend and harder still to incarcerate, well that wasn't their department, particularly since federal law made intentionally turning yourself into a proto-human illegal.

But strictly speaking, there was no reason for the department not to be succesful. Universities had, thanks to Doctor Leo Quintum, been teaching meta-genetics since the eighties (the subject 'People of Tomorrow' in particular), and no shortage of R&D companies had been assimilating Alien technology for even longer, even with human interstellar travel remaining out of the picture. But it took a long time for the government to acknowledge these developments, and longer still to understand just how fast the times were a'changing. The mindset that such changes could be controlled and put to constructive use dictated by the government never really went away, more is the pity. Many technologies that would have made the job possible, such as Stark Industries metagene-suppressors developed by Harley Cohen, were never put into wide-spread use.

Indeed, for the last ten years the entire department enforcement division had been a lone maniac operating in Hub City named Joe Gilmore, or, as he preferred to be called, 'Marshal Law', and his two deputies. Rumor was that the only reason they kept him on the force was because nobody was brave enough to tell him that the department was being shut down, making him redundant, which was by no means an unreasonable way to act around that maniac. Even the Frank Castle thought he was out of control, and refused to be compared to him.

But somehow, America managed, more or less, without an effective law-enforcement division to deal with super-crime. For international threats, they had Stormwatch, and SHIELD, for local ones they had conventional officers of the law, and, perhaps most tellingly, there was no real shortage of willing hands that volunteered independently, and had for the most part succeeded admirably. So superheroes would have to do. Why rock the boat?

President Lex Luthor had found this attitude unacceptable. It wasn't the first thing he changed, but when it came to his attention it was the one he put the most work into the most quickly. Shortly after his creation of the Human Defense Corps, a branch of the military established to reduce government dependency on superhumans when a major alien crisis breaks out, act as back-up to Earth's superheroes, and specifically counter any alien threat to Earth, he had turned his gaze to law-enforcement.

And so Joe Gilmore was booted off the force and stripped of all his assets they could find. They would have arrested him as well if he hadn't escaped and not left a trail. Their efforts wouldn't stop his war, but it would make it clear the government no longer condoned his brutal mishandling of the situation. And something more permanent and useful was developed in it's place, rather than a separate organization it was folded into the conventional Police Hierarchy, complete with it's own string of detectives recruited from other departments, and it's own place in the chain of command. Furthermore, they were expected to deputize with local operating vigilantes to apprehend the more dangerous metahumans, and otherwise update practices to something like competence.

And, surprisingly, it worked, or seemed to. Lex Luthor was not an altruist, and was a criminal himself, though that had never been proven. His business ran a lot smoother, as did that of his immediate allies, if the public was more concerned with highly public brightly clad psychopaths then white collar crime.

The 'Powers' division was still new. There was still a lot to work out. But in the last two years, there was less of a need to rely on traditional methods for the apprehension, monitoring and control of proto-humans and aliens, and an increasing emphasis on the local authorities. But they'd upset the dynamic that had existed for so long, and changed the rules of the game.

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Detective Kellaway scratched his chin thoughtfully. The few police who were not unspeakably corrupt in Basin City soon found themselves used to things that in any other city would come off as unspeakably perverse and would be milked by the local news for months out of sheer shock-value. They may not have anything to match the home-grown psychopaths of Gotham, but they had more then enough in quantity to make up for it. And their psychopaths tended to get away with it. The only masked-vigilante mad enough to operate here without sinking to their level and being reduced to just another criminal was Moon Knight, and a glance was enough to tell a casual observer that he was probably a lunatic.

Organized crime, however… well, Parker Robins and his closest men could take out entire armies single-handed, and the police and government were so corrupt that they were practically unopposed. That itself would be enough to make his job impossible, but when you considered things like this…

It was three in the morning. He'd been woken up by his phone ringing, and dragged into the seedier part of the projects to investigate the whole thing, type up the report nobody would ever care about, and realize that he's not being paid nearly enough, though he knew that already.

"Man's been butchered." He said at last, staring down at the victim, but not touching. None of that until forensics said it was alright. "Someone wanted him for meat."

Detective Lionel, Kellaways only real friend, blinked. "Really?" He asked, incredulous. Cannibalism wasn't unknown by the Basin CIty police department, indeed the DA was in the process of preparing a case against an astoundingly disturbed thug called Marv who, compelling evidence suggested, had eaten two score hookers, then killed a dozen cops, an entire S.W.A.T team and cardinal Roarke. "Crap. Knew I shoulda taken that cushy job in Hub City homicide."

But that by no means meant that it was common.

Kellaway grunted, ignoring the attempt at humor, then squatted down. "Look at how precisely, how decisively the incisions were. Nothing spoiled or wasted. This is a guy who's done it before. No sign of sexual interference, nothing indicates torture, hell, still change in the pockets." His voice had a barking quality, like an angry bulldog.

He shook his head in disgust. "Livers missing, thymus is gone, intention are pretty obvious. No fingerprints forensics can find, no sweat or skin or hair or anything at all. Not a spec that points to the perpetrator. But probably no connection to the mystery man who enforces for the mob, unless he's had a change of M.O."

"So where does that leave us?" Lionel asked. It is an axiom of behavioral science that vampires (the mental condition, rather then the supernatural denizens of the night) are territorial, and cannibals range widely across the country. "Look through records, see if we can find another case from elsewhere and pick it up?"

"What else? You boys have done all you can here." Said the newcomer, in a fine, rolling voice. He was a tall, spare man, at once looking youthful and old, a tad careworn but extremely well-preserved. He wore a brown suit and overcoat that showed off the lean lines of his build, and had an honest, irish face, perhaps a little to clever for it's own good. His hair was bright red bar a streak of white, brushed back, and his jaw was long. He had a detective badge at his belt, but no gun.

Kellaway snapped around, and narrowed his eyes. "This is my case, Jim. Since when are you in homicide anyway?"

"That's detective Corrigan to you, Kellaway." He replied with a smile, the matchstick he was chewing on moving around a bit and pointing up. Neither of them had known him to ever smoke (though they couldn't if pressed, tell you how long he'd been on the force or how long they'd known him), but he seemed to have retained that much as a habit. "Now stop trying to scare me away. it won't work. I might just pick up somethig you've missed."

"Nothing to see here anyway. Man was nobody important. Stevedore out of work, living alone, no next of kin. Chances are, this isn't going to ever get mentioned again. I mean, who cares?" There was a bitter, biting quality in the detective's voice now. Basin City was not a good place for a man who cared about law, order and justice.

"Think you'd be surprised there, detective. But if you say so." As he walked away, he faded from their minds, the short and inconclusive meeting dropping out of their short-term memory until they'd forgotten he was here, forgotten that, mere moments ago, they'd thought they knew him, forgotten everything about the tall man with the red hair, and the deep, ancient eyes.

---------------------------
Herr Wallenquist, or 'The Kraut' if you were in a disparaging mood, was a glorified accountant and investment overseer, who nonetheless fronted most of the Mob's more 'inspired' ventures, including their sizable human traffic operations. However, his most significant contribution to the mob's vast operations was his deft and almost uncanny ability to hide dirty money. He connected intricate systems of phony business fronts and supposedly failed investment ventures that successfully helped the illicit billions disappear without a trace.

It was likely that without him supplying the financial magic launder all the ill-gotten wealth, Top Dollar would have simply burned his profits. Getting rich was never the point of his life and work, that purpose was always the utter dominance and subjugation of his fellow man, and the mindless destruction and depravity that captivated him so. Wallenquist was big and strong looking, with sloping shoulders and a blunt face characterized by heavy scars of old chemical burns. He wore a tailored suit, and sat behind a desk from which he oversaw the criminal empire. He thoughtfully took a deep drag on his cigar, breathing out a cloud of smoke, then nodded once to Mariah, his right-hand woman. "Get me Walter." He said.

Walter (his last name as much a mystery as Kellaway's first name) was a sado-masochist lunatic who suffered from a severe case of glandular gigantism, it's primary symptoms being he was 8'1 with sloping gorilla shoulders and fingers the size of a more normal mans wrists. He walked around in a three-thousand dollar suit, working as a muscle-man for the mob when it suited him (and ignoring them when it didn't), mutilating himself entirely to mess with peoples heads, and when called to do violence, twisting people around the waist until their belly-button and ass-crack make an exclamation mark. Of course, like the proverbial 900-pound gorilla, he could more or less go wherever he wanted. He even ran for mayor once.

Walter had been caught, tried, and hanged by whatever neck he possessed, and he'd walked away none the worse for wear. He'd been given the chair three times, the lethal injection twice, and had been shot by the police, the mafia, Frank Castle, and quite a few other people. Bullets didn't take, though they made him bleed they didn't get much further than his upper tissues. He'd been stabbed, and blown up with gelignite. No sell. Something to do with thick bones. He'd been drowned, attacked by lions, and horribly burned, but it had barely slowed him down either. His enemies were going to have to find some other way to kill him, since conventional methods were not going to do the job.

He never spoke. He could, there was physically nothing wrong with him bar his tremendous size, strength and durability, he just chose to remain voiceless, letting his actions speak for him. Which was harsh, as he tended to treat other people as a kind of inconvenient fog.

"We need to make an example of this Wallace. To demonstrate that we are not to be trifled with. So have him find the man, and kill both him and the woman he defied us for."

So, any nominations for the Midnight Sons? Blade, Michael Morbius and Ghost Rider are without saying, of course, but if there are any other suggestions, let me know.

Beneath the Waves #1: The Black Manta Rises…

Spoiler

Show

Daylight began to tinge the sky, morning brightening the ocean, above gentle lapping waves and the smell of salt. It was going to be a clear day, the ocean sparkled as the first rays of dawn fell on the cool surface, and the calls of gulls could be heard above the gentle splashing of the water bellow.

The sea began to rumble. Bubbles began to boil in the dark waters, accompanied by a bright, submerged glow and a loud throbbing of massive muffled engines. The splashing, churning noise increased, and then a huge, black coning tower broke the surface like a beaching whale. The plated vessel rose up and up, gushing water as it climbed higher and higher until it loomed over the ocean. But the tower was merely the tip of the iceberg.

High and long, with elegant sea-faring lines, the submarine surfaced majestically, splitting the ocean as it did. Despite being nearly a kilometer long, the black ship was sleek and maneuverable, with elegant curving lines broken only by it's engines and weapons batteries. It's sides were thickly armored to withstand the intense pressure of deep sea.

From stern to haft, it was beautifully, horribly lethal, like a big, mechanical shark. The Devil-Ray was one-of-a-kind, a noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy one. All noble things are touched with that, perhaps. It had been constructed a decade ago, third in a line of such flagships to head their masters fleet, and greatest so far, though no doubt in time it too would be surpassed just as it had surpassed it's predecessors. It glided in the depths, deeper then any man had ever been before, or across the surface with equal impunity.

The Devil-Ray was apparelled like a barbaric emperor with primal splendor and polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies, tricking forth in the chased bones of her enemies and sheaves of sea-ivory over the heavy iron plates that armored the hull.

Aboard the underwater war-vessel, the crewmen, all dressed identically in dark black armor that made them as featureless and identical as drones, went about their duties, working together in a grim blur, calling readings to each other in a dozen different languages, running through test results and otherwise undertaking the many necessary preparations. They checked vital systems and tested equipment, and otherwise got the submersible ready. The captain had issued his orders, and the submarine craft was under way, heading for it's important rendezvous. The Devil-Ray's engines thundered to life, and the propellers churned up a thunderous foaming wake, as though a dragon had just passed by. Making good time as it rounded the boot of Italy and cruised up the eastern coast, the Devil-Ray running full power under a magnificent sky.

While the engine hummed and an enclosed clock ticked on the curved metal wall, a dark man sat at a table in his cabin, enjoying a meal of Deep-sea Red Lobster, green oysters and and Anatolian figs, with a glass of golden Spanish Amontillado to go with it. His name was David Dakkar, although he was better known as Black Manta. He was tall, swarthy and sleek, with deep wide-set eyes, short- cropped dark hair and a close-trimmed beard around his jaw. There were wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and his cheekbones were strong and gave his face a fierce aspect. His helmet rests on the table, but even at rest in the heart of his fortress he wears his customary armor, consisting of narrow interlocked plates that fit snugly over his form. They are sturdy but comfortable enough, and extremely practical. It's Stark tech, and is extremely advanced, as well as capable of withstanding the pressures of the ocean without any discomfort.

Dakkar is a man of spare and spartan habits, retaining for his own use the barest minimum. Despite possessing almost unimaginable wealth, his cabin resembled a monk's cell, stark and bare, devoid of ornamentation or sentiment. There is a cot, for sleeping, bolted to the deck, the table at which he now sits with a single chair (he has nobody he wishes to share his meals with), and a collection of advanced-weapons on the wall, enough to serve every conceivable purpose, but all geared for underwater combat.

When he finishes his meal, he takes a white linen napkin and delicately wipes his face, before dropping it on the empty plate and placing them both on a trolley, reaching over and ringing a bell as he did. One of the crewmen arrived, inclined his helmeted head, then removed his meal, leaving him once more alone in his room. Dakkar was oddly still, unnaturally so, his breathing slow and regular and blinking twice every minute. Even when the hour came and the ship began it's dive he didn't stir, still and cold as a statue. This was the edge of the Abyss, and the ebb and flow of blood through his veins and arteries was in perfect sympathy with the rhythm of the tides.

The ocean was in his blood. It mysteries and power intoxicated him, as it had all his ancestors before him. But while they had all come to it as explorers and scientists, he came as a conqueror, determined to master it for his own. It was a harsh legacy, but one that he could no more set aside then he could his war with the people who lived in the depths. Nothing else he desired, not the luster of gold, or the love of others, or even the power and adoration of authority. No, to dominate something was to posses it utterly, not by the acceptance of others but the strength of oneself.

And he was strong.

Beyond his cabin was a world of unrestrained splendor and military might. They were pirates (and occasional terrorists and private military contractors), perhaps, but exceptionally successful pirates, and but for the cities of the Atlantans in the deepest trenches of the ocean, all beneath the sea was theirs, though some disputed that claim.

All the gold and jewels of imagination are of no worth to them anymore. For all the treasure of all the ships that have ever sunk is gathered to them, and should they want more, they would sink more ships and drown more sailors.

On the upper levels, each of the crew had a room of their own, all three hundred of them, large enough for personal effects and their own space, as well as all they could want to entertain themselves. These include a library with displayed collections of valuable and preserved oceanic specimens, many of which remain undiscovered to the world above, expensive paintings, and an entire hold full to bursting with jewels. There was also a lavish dining room where meals were regularly prepared (Black Manta ate his meals alone, he didn't fraternize), and even an organ that the Captain has been known to use to entertain himself in the evening. Those that cared about such things had wives and children in the great fortress built under the arctic where they raised another generation to serve the conquerors of the ocean, and the only cost was six months at sea at a time. Many of them would never set foot on dry land again for as long as they lived, but they would never lack for comfort, as long as they remained loyal and strong.

Pressure gauges vented, equalizing the compressed air within, turbines turned and engines pumped, and the ship plunged into the depths, sliding smoothly down beneath the surface. Below the coning tower, in the submarine's control room, the first mate peered at the small view-screen. The Devil-ray had no viewing portal, it was built to traverse the deepest abyssal channels of the ocean floor, and at extreme depths even the most heavily reinforced window would crumple under pressure. In it's stead, the screen fed visual information from the sensor arrays on the exterior. Little could be seen apart from occasional bubbles of expanding gas, and the visage of his blank mask was reflected back at him, distorted a little on the monitor. A kilometer down and accelerating. Long way yet to go.

He hunched over the complex controls of the craft, looking ludicrously large hunched over the dials and levers that controlled the pitch, speed, depth and direction and roll of the massive submersible. This was more of an abyss then the depths of deep space, at least there pin-pricks of light could be glimpsed, distant stars and coronas a hundred million light years distant. Here, the darkness was complete and all consuming, but for the lonely glow of the lamps around the hull that offered meager illumination.

The bridge had gone silent, the only sound being the steady hum of machinery, the ticking of the clock, the pumping noises below deck, and the faint sound of breathing. Not one of them said a word. They rarely spoke anymore, thanks to the anonymity and the functions they performed, the were all as strangers to each other, in their lonely existence.

At last he turned away from his instruments, and allowed himself the luxury of speech. "Gentlemen? We've found it." The First Mate said, in a soft voice. "Alert the captain at once. He's been waiting such a long time for this."

So who is king of Atlantis? Namor, or Aquaman?

[Cracklord]

I'd suggest Spawn for one, as far as the Midnight Sons are concerned. As to the question of Atlantis, Namor, obviously. Aquaman is king of the entire sea.
Also, nice detail with Black Manta's name. Same as Captain Nemo's, I like it.

[darkblade]

If either of you would step up and fill in I'll stick around and help guide the story I just can't run it myself right now.

Also I'd like to reserve Japan in the Shatterworld story. Go into it's relations with it's heroes and monsters (very few supervillians in Japan, it's mostly monsters). Particularly since the real world terms of surrender in WWII would not allow for them to hold their own military for many years and is still restrictive in what they are allowed. In a world where WWII was the first war to involve large scale superhuman involvement it would likely bar the country from having heroes tied to the state.

To counteract this in the face of Shocker/HYDRA using Axis superweapons to recapture the nation and Kaiju being just plain destructive, they sucker up to various SHIELD affiliates to get Japanese soldiers into various super task force initiatives (resulting in the Super Sentai Goranger through to Jetman). In addition to courting other superhumans to act as free agents and convincing eccentric wealthy citizens to finance their own super teams for the good of the nation (most other anime and toku heroes).

Of course after the small handful of times Godzilla made landfall in the US in the 80s and 90s, as well as being one of the few free capitalist states left in Asia as Red Son's Warsaw Pact expands and finally Fury's concern over the effectiveness of the Avengers with Luthor in the Whitehouse the ban will be lifted by '93.

[doliest]

I'm going to leave it up to Cracklord which of us DM's the game to conclusion. I have stuff going down right now, but only Mid-terms, so it'll be over by Wednesday. So yeah, I'm good to do it, but I'm also willing to acknowledge my not so good track record.

[Cracklord]

Then send me your notes, and I'll get started right away. If anyone wants my characters, you are welcome to them.

Here's my contribution.
The Brothers Wilson, issues #1-#6 collected in a trade-back with a snazzy, silver-agesque cover.

Wilson Brothers #1

Spoiler

Show

"Glad you could make the time to see me." Luthor said, dressed in pristine white as always, an eyebrow flickering as two men step into dark his office. With only the computer monitor to light up the room, there was an artificial feeling to the place. The door closed automatically behind the two of them, shutting them off from the rest of the world with one of the most dangerous people ever born. The pale, cold light shone on his face, lighting it up like a ghost.
"Well you made a very tempting offer." Slade said. "I've never considered losing my independence, since I went into business myself, but I do like the sound of Chief of Homeland Security, and the paycheck that goes with it." Underneath Deathstroke's outfit was a single eyed man named Slade Wilson, commonly held to be the best soldier ever produced, and one of the deadliest men alive. He was as good as he could be when he had enlisted, the child of a broken home, another young idealist who wanted to grow up to be Captain America.
He'd enlisted and become a green beret, a commando who had gone from non-commisioned officer to lieutenant, proving exceptional, and had survived multiple tours of duty in some truly god-awful hellholes across the world in conflicts that never made even the back pages of the news, not merely getting by but actually managing to thrive. And so he'd been selected for 'Project Rebirth: Weapon X'. He'd been designated 'Subject Alpha', the first to go through the process and the intended leader of the team, after being subjected to what amounted to little more then high-tech butchery.
It had begun with a week restrained as numerous synthetic hormones and anti-rejection drugs, artificial proteins and bonding agents were pumped into his bloodstream, rebuilding his muscle structure with high-performance steroids and altering his metabolism to make him more efficient. Then had followed a week of microsurgery and brain-surgery as they pumped a series of accelerants into his cerebral cortex, then had gotten to work on his fine-motor skills and senses, making him better still. His body had wavered, but eventually stabilized, giving him superhuman strength, reflexes and capabilities, uncanny senses as well as making his mind far more efficient in terms of processing power, turning him into a grand master among strategists.
Slade had lost whatever idealism he had possessed in the process, breaking out, killed anyone who got in his way and put his new skills to work for himself, a mercenary and assassin, while focusing the rest of his attention on his family. Unfortunately, along the line, he'd become addicted to killing, which had destroyed everything he touched. Now he preferred to work alone. He worked better alone, less entanglements and opportunity to be compromised. However, this time was an exception at the employers request.
"Nothing has been decided yet." The other man says. He's not as muscular as his older brother, or as light on his feet and controlled in his movements, or even as purposeful, but in a strange but very definite way seems just as dangerous.
He was was wearing black and red bodysuit that covered his whole body. He had two twin Katanas strapped securely to his back as part of a modified special forces harness, and a holster on each hip. This man's name was Wade Wilson, or if you preferred, Deadpool. Wade Wilson was an efficient, deadly, and crazy mercenary for hire. He was once worked for the military in special forces and covert ops until he was diagnosed with terminal cancer from a lifetime of smoking. Angry and distraught over his impeding death, he began to lash out and caused several incidents before he was dishonorably discharged. Volunteering for Weapon X, he was the infused with the healing factor of a patient that he only knew as Weapon X, Weapon X's healing factor, which had resulted in him being horribly disfigured and mentally unstable.
A pout was hidden behind a layer of black and red cloth, as he tried to figure out why he was feeling slightly at a loss, wondering what he was doing there. There was just something… different. He couldn't quite place his finger on it, but existence in general just felt slightly off. He didn't like that. It was hard enough dealing with the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in a epistemologically ambiguous universe dictated by the whims of narrative structure.
"For one thing, I think I'd be better at the job, though I prefer to be referred to as a cleaner of the gene pool.. I even have a few schematics for new uniforms for everyone to wear, that I'd like you to take a look at." Wade continued, then held up some old newspaper scraps. "I designed them myself one rainy afternoon. In crayon." He shrugged. "Hey, inspiration strikes sudden and fast, and if you look at them I believe you'll find my genius speaks for itself."
His heart wasn't really in the banter. He was still a little lost and confused by the situation he'd found himself in, spatially speaking. "By the way, you don't know what issue I'm in, do you? I seem to have lost track."
Luthor raised an eyebrow, then decided he didn't want to ask. He'd never worked with Deadpool before, and so was little taken aback at his... interesting way of going about things. "Well, we'll see." He said diplomatically at last. "But first there is the matter of a job I'd like you to do."
"I'm not cleaning your swimming pool. Don't have the skill-set to clean that sort of pool. Money is no object at all, even for a man with no pride." Deadpool replied without thinking, still looking around the room. If he stared long enough, concentrating on a different vantage point from the norm, especially while ignoring whatever occupied the foreground and occupying anybody else, he could recognize the boundaries of panels, see his yellow inner monologue boxes…
Nothing. He tapped the corner of his head a few times. Beginning inner monologue: In the immortal words of Rorschach, who I will find a way to co-star with someday in what will be the greatest trade-paperback of all time, Hurm. This medium has become corrupt. Decadent. Liberal. Confused. Everything in italics, no yellow background, betraying all it once stood for. Cowardly and superstitious lot. Comic Sans MS font missing, something something gutters overflowing something something something dark side. Possibly the fault of editorial change. Must investigate further.
Huh. "Hey, do you think they're experimenting and not doing panels right now? Ooh! I know, maybe this is a full page sort of thing? But that wouldn't explain all the… Maybe this is a movie! No one told me they were starting it yet, and you'd think I'd know. Well, one things for sure, I know I'm not Green Lantern. Maybe…"
"Shut up." Slade growled, a little embarrassed by his brothers relentless babbling. He was approaching the point where it was necessary to rein his brother in, which unfortunately meant sinking to his level. He wasn't looking forward to it.
"I'm in the middle of a mystery here, attempting to classify the medium I've found myself in, and thereby set the limits of the possible. Which is why I'm not doing anything until the bald gentleman asks me to. He's the one cutting the checks."
"Silence." Luthor said, bemused by what was rapidly becoming a farce. Luthor was used to a higher standard of professionalism.
"Not until I see some money." A terrible thought struck Deadpool, that made him forget all about his attempts to comprehend his universe, as was par the course for him. He'd get worked up about something, and before he knew it he would be distracted and forget what he had originally been doing in the first place. "Wait. Wait wait wait. Wait. This isn't one of those patriotic things, is it? Because my doctor tells me I have a natural deficiency in moral fiber and that I am in desperate need of a spine transplant, making me therefore exempt from saving America. Unless I get a badge, and a big statue of me looking all noble and heroic, a clever caption underneath, and a trade paperback written by Mark Millar co-staring Rorschach."
"No it's not anything like that. Strictly off the books, but very profitable because the money isn't traceable. Nothing that a pair of professionals with your talents cannot handle." He gave a smile that was cold and threatening. "I'm sure this is the start of a long and effective venture."
"We are? That doesn't mean you're going to pay me in baseball cards, does it?"
Luthor blinked. "Would you like me to?"
"Yes. I mean no. I mean... I don't even know what I'm saying! Or why I'm here, or why it all makes so much sense! Damnit, stop confusing me! You're the most infuriating man I've ever met!"
Luthor did the only thing he could think of to move the conversation on, and back into the direction he'd envisioned. He pressed a button on the remote in his hand, and let what it did speak for itself.
A light came on in another section of the room, revealing a table covered with all a manner of the latest of Luthorcorp weapons innovations, ranging from small gadgets that could double as surgical instruments to guns the size of your leg that could liquify an entire mountain. Some Stark equipment fleshed it out for good measure, as well as Wayne Enterprises communications and other, less immediately identifiable brands. Destro-Tech. Hammer-Tech. Kord-Tech, all the big names in research and development technology. Even some wild-cards made by Ezekiel Stane. With all this, you could fight a large war against anyone you wanted.
"Heavens to Betsy!" Deadpool skipped over like a giddy school girl and picked up one of the shiny - oh so shiny - weapons. His eyes shone with something like avarice… no lets be clear. Avarice was exactly what it was. The Ameritek BG-80 (That he'd already privately named the 'The Toast-Maker', though on a moments reflection 'Party-Crasher' might be a better name) was a hand-held particle accelerator, alternately known as a particle crasher, if one was more concerned about explaining what it actually did. It generated molecular sized granules of anti-matter then shot them at relativistic velocities. To say that the damage it did was considerable understated matters by an entire order of magnitude. This was for hunting big game.
He couldn't help it. He squealed happily, then coughed. "I did that out loud, didn't I? That was meant to be an internal thing… You stabbed me in the medulla oblongata. How rude."
"Using surgical terms doesn't make you smart." Slade replies as he removes the serrated bowie knife from the top of Deadpools skull, then pried the gun out of his hands and puts it back on the table. "Particularly when you use them to describe being stabbed in wrong portion of the brain. Now be quiet and let Luthor speak, or I'll stab you again."
This was old banter ground the two had honed as surely as any long married couple. "You think I'm stupid? I'd like to see you even talk when you have a knife in you're brain, let alone incorrectly label your grey matter."
"I have told you that I think that you're stupid, to your face, almost as many times as I've told you that you are a disgrace to the profession and you make a mockery of our work." Slade replied, cleaning the knife then replacing it. In deference to protocol, he'd disarmed himself before entering the room. In deference to the fact he never went anywhere unarmed, he'd kept the knife. Not that he needed it to kill a man, but it was a respect thing.
"That's a very hurtful thing to say, when all I really want is to be just like you." Deadpool replied. "Just like whatshername cyclops..."
There are some conversation topics you just don't start around Slade. One is Rose Wilson's schizophrenia that he was more or less responsible for. This time Slade stabbed him through the midsection, perfectly skewering one of his kidneys, then kept on pushing until the tip of the knife poked through the other side out the other side, just after he finished cleaning it. He then twisted it, just to make his point.
"ARGH! Ooo! Must…resist…iron in diet…jokes…"
"That's about enough. If the two of you could stop this delightful insight into the exact definition of the word dysfunction long enough for me to explain why you are both here…" Luthor said quietly before trailing off meaningfully, in the tones of one who doesn't raise his voice because nobody would be stupid enough not to pay attention to him. He was getting sick of putting up with this, and when Luthor got that way, people's lives were destroyed.
"Yeah, that would probably be a good idea. It would really be a shame if I didn't have anyone to use all this shiny weaponry on." Deadpool said, stepping away from the predatory gleam in his brothers eye like it's what he wanted to do all along and stroking it all with his fingertips (but not actually picking any of it up).
Luthor pressed a button, activating the screens behind him. One showed a facility they were both very familiar with in the wilds of Canada. Time and nature were in the process of reclaiming it, the wind had eroded most of the paint off the buildings and ripped off anything that wasn't bolted in place, and the stone was beginning to crumble while the iron rusted. Time had not been kind to that facility. The photo was taken from above by virtue of a satellite, and the day was fairly clear so the picture was good.
The next slide showed an estate referred to as Xavier's institute for the gifted. That was shielded, but Luthor had known what to look for, and once he had determined the frequency it was an easy matter to restore the actual spectrum without anyone being the wiser. Of course, the school wasn't as big as it had once been.
Deadpool whistled, his quip about the fact that the remote only seemed to have one button that did everything dying on his lips. "Nice. You get Cinamax on that?"
Luthor shrugged. "Cinamax, HBO, all the channels." He says, then smiles. "One of the jobs perks."
"Would you cut that out?" Slade asked his brother, rolling his eye in exasperation. That was his little brothers effect. Even the most serious and stoic of people will begin to act like morons in his presence. He was immune himself (or so he thought, though his brother was the only person he bantered with, or indeed held a conversation with), but that only made it worse. Because he had to put up with him all the time.
"Hey, if I had a buck for every time somebody said that, I wouldn't need this job."
"If we could stay focused..." Luthor warned, pressing the button again.
"Of course Mr Luthor." Slade said. He didn't quite snap to attention, but he did regain his professional demeanor.
The next shot was of some fifty people in white and black uniforms, cut for function in the variety of hostile situations they inevitably found themselves in. It had been taken some ten years ago, and almost all of them were in their mid-to-late teens. They were mostly smiling as well, bar a few moody little tykes. In the middle and at the front was an elderly bald man in a wheelchair, Charles Xavier, the teams founder, leader, and many more things.
"I'm sure you recognize them. The X-Men, who sought to promote Mutant rights by putting together a team and advocating paramilitary behavior as activists for social change." Luthor said. "This is the first line-up, though there has gone on to be countless variations as the roster shifts." He smiled. "Some died, others moved back into society and stopped declaring themselves to be dangerously independent, others went missing."
"As you are probably informed, the X-Men officially disbanded with the death of Charles Xavier, almost a decade ago, although they've been unsuccessfully reformed a few times, and a few splinter groups all insist on being referred to by the name. Currently, one Scott Summers leads the majority from the mansion I showed earlier, which is now his property. But regardless, even those who have gone on to lead lives reabsorbed into the world as a whole continue to uphold the legacy of their late teacher's work in their own, private ways, going on to become members of international organizations of social reformers who make use of their talents, or joining the Brotherhood under Magnetto." He sneered. "All very touching, I'm sure."
"Is there a job in there somewhere?" Slade asked, a big hand clasped over his brothers mouth tight enough to dislocate his jaw if he twitched it to keep Wade from speaking, while Deadpool danced around trying to force the words out through sheer force of will.
"Absolutely. The man I want you to kill is James Howlett, commonly known as Logan, or if you prefer, Wolverine. Hence you, Deadpool, it's my understanding that the two of you have met several times, and I assume you to be passingly familiar with his habits. I've had my attention on him in general, and those he is connected to, for a while now. The man himself doesn't interest me, just one more dead-end on the route to progress, but he is well connected amongst the former mutant army Charles Xavier built, and considered one of the worlds premier threats." He smiled at that. "An exaggeration. Regardless, find him, restrain him, and make him a non-issue. Once you do, there are some further dozen of influence who might become a problem. But once they are dealt with, the remainder should congregate to the mansion."
"When they have, you are to return, and lead an attack on the mansion, taking as many of them into custody as possible. Charles Xavier's legacy is an army of proto-humans. I want to put them to use, whether as resources, or as test subjects." Luthor says, than hands Slade a check. A blank check, already signed. "Once you have done that, take them to a secure location and contact me, and my men will deal with the rest. You do that, and you can fill in any number you like up there."
For a moment, silence. Then Slade smiled a predatory smile, had a little shiver, then lowered his head. "Upon consideration, President Luthor, I'm willing to waive my usual fee. Let's settle for pro bono, compliments of the establishment, and you can just settle the expenses upon completion."
It was so unexpected a response that the room went silent, both of them staring at him in slack-jawed amazement. They couldn't have been more amazed if Galactus had burst in, dancing the cancan and juggling key lime pies.
"Brother, what are you doing?" Deadpool managed to choke out. "Undermining me like this in front of the prospective client?" He rounded on Slade, now well on his way to being outraged. "We have this dynamic worked out already, and I do not appreciate you deviating from the established script! I'm the whimsical, lovably psychotic, crazy one! Me! You're the stoic, serious, gets the job done one! You're just going to confuse readers! We are the fighting, dancing, singing Wilson brothers! We do not do charity work! Why are you making us work for free? All that money..." His voice trailed off, as he considered all the possibilities that sort of money could bring. What couldn't he do with that sort of money? Then he started to consider what he could do. It was a much, much longer and more detailed list.
"Wade, this is a matter of honor." Slade replied, his voice low and containing deep satisfaction, folding his arms across his chest. "We do not cheapen that."
"What honor would that be? Weapon X was ages ago, you want a fight do it in your own time like everyone else. Right now, papa wants a new flatscreen television, and a trip to the Bahamas." He replied, himself in a role he rarely played, that of the voice of reason. Then he fell silent, because Slade stabbed him again. The liver, this time.
"Stop that! And I'm not going to work for free. I do that enough already with Cable."
"Shall we say two weeks to deal with the primary target, and a further month to deal with the secondary objectives. And ten thousand for every additional mutant we deal with." He said to Luthor, cleaning the knife for the third time even though Deadpool would open his mouth and he'd just get it dirty again, but it was the principle of the thing.
"I have no objections at all." Luthor said, though he usually preferred to work with those he could control, and wasn't liking this new side of Deathstroke. He'd used him in all sorts of jobs many times, and he'd never seen this side of the mercenary. Slade as a mercenary was a controlled condition, Slade with is own agenda...
Well, he was a professional, and rarely failed. "Pleasure doing business with you."
"Good. Then I'll kill your animal for you. Brother? We're going."

If this feels familiar, it's only because it is. But don't worry, I've expanded on it quite a lot since last time.

Wilson Brothers #2

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Slade always had money, and lots of it, because nobody would dare default a payment to him, even if it meant selling their children. No crappy bachelors apartment for Slade, he lived in a rotating series of safe-houses scattered around the country, at the moment a huge mansion in New Engand, far bigger than two people really needed. It always felt vast and echoing, like a cavity waiting to be filled. It was tastefully decorated, there were none of the giant, gold-framed mirrors or incomprehensible expressionist paintings that only the most affluent trendy can buy (Slade didn't have a head for art anyway), but all of the original seventeenth and eighteenth century furniture was still there. Slade never even touched it. To him, the comfort was irrelevant, and the whole place was just window dressing. He actually lived in a bunker underneath, where he stored his armaments and reconnaissance information for his jobs, and only came up to sleep, eat, and leave.
The ceiling was two stories high, and a wide, grand staircase with an ornate metal railing swept up to the second floor, where a straight-backed, dignified gentleman, with fierce whiskers and eyes that remain piercing. Like the two brothers Wilson, he has a face of contrasts and visual reminders of the life it's lived. It might have been pretty once, but now it's littered with thin scars and jowls just beginning to sag. William Randolph Wintergreen had been in the SAS for two decades, and the best man at his masters wedding, and now served as Slade's right hand man, moral conscience, comrade in arms, butler and housekeeper.
Deadpool ran up the stairs three at a time and embraced him in a hug that the gentleman in question found extremely uncomfortable. "Wintergreen! How I have missed you! My place just isn't the same without someone to pick up pizza boxes and soda cans. You have no idea, but they really start to pile up after a while. Hey, maybe you could come over and do something about it." He nudged him in the ribs, and then gave him a big, cheesy wink.
"You could pick them up yourself." Slade pointed out, folding his arms across his chest.
"Yeah, but that's kinda what Wintergreen is for."
"Regretfully, master Wade, my work for your brother is somewhat full time. I haven't the time for a life of my own, never mind the time to assist you in yours."
"Well I'm not saying you should drop everything, just that you should be a bit more considerate." Deadpool says, impervious to sarcasm, then skips back down the stairs. "Twice a week should be more then enough. Just make sure you don't come on saturday. I 'entertain' 'company' on saturday." He nudged his brother in the ribs this time. "If you 'know' what I 'mean'."
The two of them didn't actually work together all that often. Slade was at his most deadly alone (or so he always claimed), and Deadpool took the sort of jobs he felt were beneath his dignity, which was why he'd run into some financial difficulties in the last while. I mean, all that stuff costs money, and as he was fond of complaining, he's gotten paid exactly twice since his 2009 books, whatever the hell that means. More to the point, Deadpool was an unpredictable loose cannon with several cannons of his own, and Slade was a control freak who was obsessed with precision, and had no problem working for people most of their community were terrified of.
Of course, Slade Wilson did have a kind of honor, in that he had a personal moral code he remained true to no matter how good the money was. Perhaps it was an unusual, specific morality that most wouldn't be able make sense of where the lines were drawn, but it suited him and his work perfectly.
1.) Family first. Not just blood, family (though Wade Defarge was the acknowledged exception, the unofficial rule being they all hated him and he hated all them). You never sided against the family, you never sold them out, or took jobs against them, and no matter what they did you kept offering them as many second chances as they needed. Also, if they needed help you gave it to them. His own very unhappy childhood had made doing better one of his priorities, and for that much he could always be relied on. You didn't have to like it, or accept it, but Deathstroke would always do his best if you were family, no matter how much you hated him.
2.) Never involve innocent bystanders. Of course, they were only bystanders if they were unconnected to the victim. Family, friends, colleagues and the like were acceptable, even if they were completely defenseless. But unconnected collateral damage was unprofessional. And try to keep the destruction of property to a minimum as well, though that rule could be safely ignored if the circumstances warranted it. Explosions, for instance, weren't particularly controllable, but were a good way to start getting the job done.
3.) Don't kill people you are not being paid for. He'd done that a few times, but the world was full of people who made him want to kill them, and he didn't have time to deal with them all. Deathstroke was in it for the money, a job was a job, no need to let it get personal.
4.) If you didn't want to do the job, you made it too expensive for anyone to afford. He had no interest in committing suicide. If you wanted a job, then you lowered the price. But once you took it, if it was beyond your abilities (and such a thing was far from common), you apologized and paid your client back. Of course, if your client died before you did it, you had no obligation unless their next of kin kept the money rolling in, and if they failed to pay you then you had an obligation to make them suffer.
5.) The rules have to be broken sometimes.
"So can I... No wait, that's just the cancer repeatedly spreading into my brain then instantly healing talking."
"No you can't."
"You don't even know what I was going to say."
"You're right. I don't." He sounds happy about that.
"I'm going to ask anyway. What was that about, or am I going to guess?"
"You mean the money? It should come to half a million once we capture them all. You can have my cut, that should be more then enough. Personally, I've been waiting a long time for someone to make this offer."
"Half a million is cheap for this sort of work and you know it, particularly when we could have gotten that much cubed, and attacking the mansion with two people is suicide any way you call it. And I still don't get why you didn't just hunt him down and kill him in your own time. Or why you want to kill mutants. What are you a racist?"
Slade's eye narrowed. "My son is a mutant."
"The one that's not dead?"
Slade's hand went to his knife. "Yes."
"Why then? If you want to kill Wolverine for free, why wait until someone asked you to?"
"I'm not a mad gunman, I am a professional. And a professional might give away his services for free on occasion, but he doesn't let things get personal." Slade replied. For him, that was a deep look at his innermost motivations. "As for the mansion, who said we'd be alone? I intend to have a hundred former special forces with big guns at out backs, laying down suppressing fire."
"Oh sure, I'd love to play soldiers again, that's why I escaped to go into business myself. Anyway, this is personal! You said it yourself! Matter of honor, I heard you say it, don't think I didn't. Wait, that first thing. What's the difference?"
"One's an occupation with a noble and glorious history, the others a mental health issue that'll get you locked up in Arkham."
"Huh. Knew there was a difference. You know, they wanted to lock me up in there once."
"Yes I do. I broke you out, as I remember."
"Oh, I remember. I remember alright." Deadpool rounded on his brother. "You couldn't have let me stay in there two more hours? I'd nearly got Poison Ivy to warm up to me and put out. Man that would have been great. We would have been great."
Slade rolled his eye, then cracked his knuckles and headed to the back room, where a staircase led down to the basement. Slade was old-school, and had converted that into his bunker and headquaters. "I'm going bellow to keep in practice. I've called my contacts, they'll soon have a location for us. We'll leave tomorrow. Keep yourself entertained in the meantime, don't let anyone know you're here and don't do anything I wouldn't do." He pauses a moment. "And keep out of my scotch."
Deadpool didn't stir until he was out of the room. "Dammit, he avoided my question. Well played sir, but you haven't beaten me yet. This calls for a devious and subtle plan of attack..."

Wilson Brothers #3

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There were only so many things you could do to amuse yourself in an empty house, even mansion. You could eat, you could watch television, you could break things, but it wasn't enough. Sooner or later, you needed someone to pay attention to you.
He pressed his hand against a matt black screen at the bottom of the stairs, and a light flashed green. Blast doors opened with a hiss in response, and he stepped into Slade's bunker.
The place was stark and spartan the way Slade liked it, just scuffed bare metal and rivets, exposed wires, a few dim lightbulbs, and a wire screen cage where one could train. The stink of perspiration and ozone was heavy in the air. From within the cage, there came a high-pitched squeal of discharging energy as a training-bot was dispatched.
Slade moved with a subtle blend of power and grace, always steps ahead of his opponents, his moves plotted and figured out well in advance. Every strike flowed into another parry or blow, his every thrust precise and deadly. He displayed an astounding economy of movement, with no unnecessary flourish or extravagance. He was using a machete, his favored weapon for close-work, and his head was lathered in sweat. Four training-bots circled him, their blank helmeted heads and swift moving bodies blurred by their humming shield units. Bladed arms cut through the air as they tried to land a blow against the sublime swordsman. Programmed to complement each other, they attacked as one, utilizing group tactics to try to overwhelm him.
Far from being dim-witted puppets with a few automated responses, they'd been designed by Doctor Dudley Noble himself with state of the art AI's capable of mimicking independent thought and creativity to an alarming degree, and had it all applied to violence suitable for vicious combat models quite capable of ripping an ordinary man to bits. Wade had seen it happen when he set them on people, as Slade had a factory in Jump City, where he manufactured them by the dozen and used them as expendable drones. Deadpool watched Deathstroke curiously. It was always a lesson to watch his brother in motion, circling and crossing, never putting a foot wrong, each motion exact and severe. As it moved, the blade made a hard whistling sound like a whip.
Stripped to the waist, his lean, muscular body was flushed with perspiration, where it wasn't puckered with old scars. He had a healing factor, they'd built him to last afterall, but it was a crude, slow and cumbersome one that was achieved by speeding up his metabolism, and thanks to it he still bore the scars of over three decades of war.
With enviable skill, Slade turned away the slashing blade with the palm of his free hand. Spinning, he deflected a second and third blow coming from different angles, and his sword cut across the face of one of the training-bots. It's shield recognized the hit in a blaze of electronics, and the bot stepped back stiffly, powering down.
Deathstroke kept moving, rounding on another one of the bots. He executed a perfect kill thrust to the chest, before turning and dropping on one knee to perform a disemboweling thrust on another, a blade whistling just inches above his head. The last of the active servitors came at him and he rose to his feet. Sidestepping a vicious slash, he swung for it's neck. His blow was turned aside, and the bot lunged, it's reflexes inhuman, looking to rip out his heart.
Wade looked to make-sure the safety option was disabled, but he needn't have worried. Slade wouldn't have his opponents holding back, even if they were just toys.
With a deft circular movement of his sword Slade turned aside both blades as they jabbed at his chest, braced himself, lowering his center of gravity. Rising, he lifted his shoulder into the bot's midsection. The weighty machine was lifted off the ground and went staggering backwards, and Slade dispatched it with a brutal blow to the head.
"Pause combat." He said before they could come back online. He went to the side of the training cage and replaced the blade on the weapons rack. Wiping a hand across his sweat slick head, he considered the array of weapons before choosing a heavy double-ended pole-arm. It had an axe-blade at one end and a curving crescent moon at the other. Slade spun it around him with deft flicks, gauging it's weight and balance.
"You come to train, brother?" He asked, though he paid Deadpool little attention, continuing to take practice swings with the new weapon.
"Yeah, that's not going to happen." Wade replied, holding up a hand. "Prefer to keep my head in the game by doing, rather then imagining, you know? And robots don't react to me like people. It's totally science. So what about you? Why the three hours in the glass cage of emotion?" He paused thoughtfully, then gave a cheeky grin beneath his mask that was almost invisible. "Getting old?"
"Don't test me, I can still knock you on your arse in six seconds flat, and have your head off in half that." Slade warned. He wasn't boasting, he'd already done the calculations. His brain had been extensively upgraded, making it nine times as efficient as an ordinary person when it came to strategy. You under-estimated that at your peril.
"Not the falling that matters, it's the getting back up, old timer." Deadpool replied. "His holiness the Dali Lama said that."
"You're taking an old, celibate, pacifist's advice on how to fight?" Slade asked. "Because that doesn't sound like a winning strategy."
"Hey they'll never see it coming. Anyway, all Asians are martial arts experts. Everyone knows that." Deadpool said defensively. "And their monks probably work the same way. If he's top monk, then that means he's undefeated, and that none can best him in the ring of honor. It's totally true, I saw it in a movie."
His brother isn't actually stupid. Sometimes, he has to forcibly remind himself that. "Right. Well, unless Shang-Chi or Sandra Wu-San has got religion and moved to Tibet, I think it's a safe bet to ignore the koans when it comes to doing violence to people."
"Lets not go there, brother. Anyway, I came to ask where my favorite niece and nephews are." Deadpool said, while he still had his brothers attention. "The ones that are still alive, I mean. I wish to shower them with gifts, and humorous anecdotes about my life, and give them some hard-won advice about how to make it in this cruel, cruel world of ours. Or possibly patronize them and make them fight for my attention, I haven't decided yet. Either way, it's very important to bond with them now, before they grow too old and stop returning my calls like pretty much everyone else I know, and besides, they're already much too old to want to fly a kite or say 'jeepers' unironically, which means that the magic of childhood is already almost used up."
Slade stared at him levelly, stopping swinging the weapon as he does, holding it loosely in his right hand. Wade didn't back down. At last he sighed, and shrugged his broad shoulders. "Rose is looking for her mother. Jericho is still in Washington. We'll see him after we finish this job, and you can be as bad an influence as you like. He's got a new body, and is talking again."
Wade, tactful as ever, grabbed onto the first point like a tick. "Isn't Rose's mom, you know, dead-"
"Yes. Buried her myself." Slade replied stiffly. Then, before Wade could offer another word, added "Recommence combat, threat level eight." The five training-bots jerked back into motion, circling him again.
"So, is she like, mysteriously back alive and much younger, with a new costume and more era appropriate history? Because you might just have hit the jackpot." He was forced to raise his voice above the escalating clamor in the training cage, but that didn't concern him. He could be as loud as he needed to be. "I mean, Lillian and you always had all that unresolved -"
Slade spun, sweeping the legs from under one, before smashing another to the ground with an empathetic blow to the head. "No." Slade said, parrying a swift blow before kicking the bot away from him with a heavy boot. "She's dead. I checked. Rose is deluding herself."
"Ah. And you figured the sensible parenting decision was to leave her adrift in her own insanity, rather then get her professional help." He clapped his hands together and tilted his head.
"She can look after herself. Which is more then I can say about you." Slade said, knocking the last of his opponents down with a series of stabbing thrusts. "Pause combat."
"That's harsh. But it's not really an answer. You're mister control freak, no way would you let her just leave unless you had no choice."
Slade stepped over to the wall where he lifted a heavy, double-headed hammer from the weapons rack. "Recommence combat, threat level nine."
"And why is it so important I come on this mission with you?"
"Deadpool."
"Yes, that's what they call me, though I'd prefer 'your holiness'."
"Not now."

[Cracklord]

Wilson Brothers #4

Spoiler

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A few hours had passed. Deadpool had gone through all the things he could find, but found nothing engaging. He'd tried moving the furniture around, to see if his brother would notice, but that got old really quickly. So he tried sneaking out of the house, but Wintergreen always materialized before he could get far, and reeled him back. At last he decided to follow the oldest and noblest of American traditions, and sit back to watch TV, despite the quality of the programs or lack thereof. He'd tried a movie, only to find that Slade didn't have any, entertainment being far below self-improvement in his priorities. There were taped training sessions and observation records (and really, why should that be surprising), lectures and events he wanted to be able to refer to, a DVD for teaching oneslf to speak several languages, when he wanted to brush up his skill, but nothing to take the edge off a dull evening. So Deadpool had turned on the Disney channel to show solidarity to his new owners.
Slade finally joined him, dressed in a white silk shirt that was unbuttoned at the top, and dark slacks. He'd showered and stretched, and his face was less stern and severe then normal. Pretending to kill a lot of people was great for his complexion.
"So, lets hold a planning session! I've never understood the appeal myself, just make it up as I go along, but whatever works. Hey, it would be a lot more bearable if we had snacks."
"Wintergreen is making dinner. We can eat later."
"I take it that you had him prepare Mexican?"
"Take-away, heated up in the microwave."
"Most triumphant. So if we can get down to brass tacks, how do you plan to find Wolverine? I mean, his popularity is waning, so you can't count on him making ludicrous and blatantly gratuitous public appearances where he isn't wanted anymore. We could get Sabertooth to track him, he always seems to be able to find him, 'cept I don't know where he is either. Chicken or the egg. What if we get his estranged son, Daken, to..."
Slade looked at him blankly. If he didn't no better, he'd think his brother had done some research. "How do you know so much about his family?"
Deadpool looked at his feet, and shuffled them. "I wanted to be an X-man. Don't judge me." He mumbled.
"While you're hardly normal, you're not a mutant, Wade." Slade said. "What's wrong with being an Avenger? Or the Justice Society, if you don't want to be the governments bitch. Something with a little dignity, that gets you a little respect. Not a bunch of private school rejects with messed up genetics."
"It wasn't a private school. And I told you not to judge me."
"Whatever. Will the job be a problem for you?" Never getting involved with a client was even more important for an assassin then it was for a Private Detective.
"What job? We're not getting paid!"
"Good. Regardless, we don't need to track him, because I had Thomas Blake find him, and the intel checks out. He's in Alaska. Alone for the most part, though he has people over now and again, and has a squeeze over, though what she sees in him I'll never know. Done his best to defect from civilization and the human race."
"Tom who?"
"Blake. You know... Catman."
"...Catman? You gave work to Catman? Slade, are you on drugs? I mean, I don't know if he was ripping off Cat-woman or Wildcat, but the guys a flabby failure, who only hasn't gone the way of so many other C-listers because actually putting him in the ground would be an unforgivable waste of ammunition. I doubt he has the credibility to even get a seat at the Iceberg lounge, let alone go after..." Deadpool trails off meaningfully. "He had a catamaran, for gods sake."
Slade shrugs. "I think he wanted to be Batman, actually." He said lightly. This was a side of Slade that only his brother ever saw, and was probably the closest thing to a man behind the mask of 'Deathstroke the Terminator' that was left. All anyone else got to see was a curt, disinterested and threatening demeanor, or occasionally a strategist and warrior. "But people change. And working with the Secret Six has done wonders for him."
Wade bristled. "You defending his catamaran?"
"I'd think you would be the expert on being treated as a joke."
"Yeah right, I only play the fool. And I still think you're being had. Why would he want to be in Alaska? Wolverine, not Catman. Seriously, there's fifty thousand trees to every woman, and nothing to drink."
"He's a loner without a purpose, and no meaningful connection to anyone anymore. It fits."
"Fits so well that apparently mister Catman was able to track him down in six hours. Yeah, I'm real convinced."
"He got an address from an old associate, then confirmed it. Noah Kuttler vouched for it. And I paid Luthor rates, so he knows he better be sure."
"You mean the Calculator? The guy who runs around with giant buttons on his chest?"
"Just because you have a gimmick doesn't mean you're useless." Slade replied evenly.
"Well, maybe, but it's just not exciting. I mean, Wolverine? Retiring? You'd think he'd at least try to find an ethnic girl half his age and start a family embracing pacifism, only to be forced to make his way across America alongside Hawkeye to save his new family from The Hulk, or something else marketable that they can try and convince people to buy despite being negative continuity. Not just withdraw into himself and drop off the radar." Deadpool shook his head. "I'm honestly kinda disappointed. Maybe we'll be doing him a favor."
Slade doubted that, but didn't say so. He didn't want to get too far off topic. "My instinct tells me not to bother with anything artful, taking him down. Just lure him somewhere, call him out, put him down, toss him in front of a train or two, then leave him somewhere until he starves to death. Bringing minions will just get them killed, and clue him in, which will lead to a long hunt through the wilderness. If I bring in the Deathstrike Clan-"
"That's still a really, really stupid name. You should have gone with something catchy-"
"The Deathstrike Clan." Slade repeated, raising his voice slightly over the top of hi brothers. "We'd lose anonymity and give them warning. Besides, I'm still not entirely happy with them yet. They need work." A few years back, Deathstroke had been dragged into the secret war that had waged in Asia since the dawn of civilization, and had killed a man. As a direct consequence he had become grandmaster of a faction called the Lin Kuei, an ancient Chinese clan who worked as assassins in the seven cities of heaven that were only connected to this world once every decade. Slade had no interest in their ancient war or the responsibilities and dogma that came with it, but he had an eye for talent, and in them he'd seen potential. In order to make use of them had been adapting their outdated tactics and doctrine, and trying to get them to embrace modernization and the advantages it bought. So far, he's had limited success, but hope springs eternal. One day, he'd have his own private army of highly trained, disciplined and fanatical immortal magic-assassins, but it was proving to be a lot of work. For the most part, robots were easier.
"Well, sure. But he does have a lot of friends, you know, and I'm not sure we can take all of them. What do we do if Freakazoid, Bueno Excellente, or Squirrel Girl or someone else shows up?"
Slade shuddered a little from contact revulsion. "Alaska is a long way from Gotham or Wisconsin, and anyway, how would he contact them?"
"Don't tell me you aren't concerned? You don't have to act tough, there's nobody to impress around."
"I don't get scared. I get mad." Slade replied. "And so should you. What safety do you have to be concerned about?"
"Well... actually, good point. Though there is my dignity to consider."
"Dignity...?" He trailed off, then shook his head and got back on subject. "Regardless, Wolverine's an easy target. Couldn't be more vulnerable if he was trying to be. Living alone, cut off from civilization and nothing immediately in his favor but his skills and the home-field advantage. Odds are pretty much in our favor, even in a fair fight."
"If I were you, brother, I'd cheat as much as I could." Deadpool replied shaking his head, then stepped back. "But you say it's a matter of honor, and I pretend to respect that, though why we can't turn an honest profit from honor I don't know."
Slade slammed the table with the palm of his hand, the furniture cracking in protest. It seemed a little melodramatic, such a sudden over-reaction, but it did get the message across. Slade only stabbed him when they had company and he wanted to keep things on track. But he still got mad. "Damn it Wade, that's my business. And after all I've done for you..."
"No call for cheap-shots." Deadpool mumbled over the top. "Besides, at least I tell you why. I don't say 'Hey brother, how you been, listen I want you to 'whack' this creepy chick'. I say 'Hey brother, what's happening, how are the kids, kill anyone interesting? Oh, before I forget, there's this creepy stalker chick named Dr. Ella Whitby, who collects my severed limbs and keeps them in a fridge for nefarious reasons. Could you kill her so I can sleep at night without the comfort of a light on, please?'. So don't act like this is the same, because you're hiding things from me, and I don't like it. Makes me feel expendable, like I'm blindly trusting you and you're going to betray me."
"... I'd expect a little trust, alright?" He finishes, ignoring his brothers babbling. It's a skill that comes and goes.
"I trust you, but I'd like you to trust me. Come on, I'm sure there are hundreds of legitimate reasons not to want to get paid, even if I don't have a clue what they might be. Tell me. I promise not to laugh."
"Pick your equipment and whatever else you think you need, and load it all up in the back of the truck, then dress warm. We're going north." Slade said, with finality, then stood up and walked away. Wade thought a moment, then changed the channel, and squealed when he noted he was just in time for a new episode of 'My Little Pony; Friendship is Magic'.
He idly wondered what Cutie Mark Nate would have, and if it would match his.

Wilson Brothers #5

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"W'shar luv t'be buck home, b'hay, eh." Deadpool said, in a horrifically exaggerated accent that would have caused any casual listener lingering physical pain. Wade was the only one who loved the sound of his own voice, to anyone else it was like a steel needle being slowly driven into your skull. Nobody needed that effect exaggerated.
And they had been indeed, or a part of it anyway. Wolverine had vanished into the wilderness and let it swallow him up. Here, the tall stark trees were more black then green, the ground was rough and uncertain, and roads were a dubious proposition. It wasn't quaint, there was no 'sylvan tranquility' or 'picturesque natural beauty'. It was a North American Jungle, and it was so far remote even God hadn't thought about it recently.
"Drop the accent. We crossed the border again," He glanced at his watch. "Half an hour ago."
"Tha's my background 'n all dat, y' hozer, eh."
"No it's not. We were born here, but we grew up in America, and you have no reason to pretend."
"I just want to fit in and be accepted." Deadpool said with a pout that was entirely wasted, since his brother didn't take his eye off the road, and besides, he was still wearing his mask. Slade had been driving eight hours nonstop, but didn't trust Deadpool to remain focussed on the job, so was looking forward to a sleepless night getting them back over the border and into Alaska. Hopefully without killing anyone, but since they were both wanted fugitives who had remained near the top of Interpol's most wanted, that was unlikely in the extreme. He'd wanted to just hop a freight, but Wade had refused, and sometimes deferring to him was just less effort.
Slade liked big, powerful vehicles that could handle anything. He'd probably drive an all-terrain tank if he could find a cloaking device durable enough to let him get away with it. Even undercover, he drove a black hummer, and only because he'd lost his collection of muscle cars that he'd bought and carefully restored after an unfortunate explosion at one of his safe-houses. The thing barely made a mile to the gallon, but it was absurdly spacious, powerful, climate-controlled, had leather seats and had tinted windows so was passingly private, and made a fine improvised weapon. But once they'd gotten off the highways and into the wilderness they'd taken a ship along the coast, then swapped it for a jeep that was more suitable for handling the rugged Alaskan wilderness. Deadpool wanted him to buy Triphammer and get a flying car, but Slade was yet to be convinced of the soundness of the investment, and Wade was still broke, having spent the last of his savings on a crushed-velvet Austin Powers suit.
Deadpool watched the landscape go by for as long as he could, which turned out to be a few minutes as it started sleeting with rain, turning it all a uniform drab gray and leaching the color from everywhere, at which point he decided to try conversation again, for hope sprang eternal.
He'd tried a dozen times a minute since they'd started the trip, and nothing Slade had done shut him up for any length of time. If it was even possible to get Wade to shut-up, Slade had yet to find a way to do it that worked more then once.
"So, you're still single, huh?"
"What?" Slade said, thrown off by an entirely unexpected attack. Not even experience helped to predict Deadpool.
"Elementary, my dear Wilson. None of the other rooms in the house are being used, the house feels completely empty. It's just your stuff. And Wintergreens, unless that's your mustache wax. So you must be alone there." Deadpool wished he had a pipe to smoke. It would look so dignified when he showed off his awesome detective skills.
"I am. So what?"
"So you should get some company you're not related to, given that after you abducted, or possibly adopted Robin, then Raven, not to mention that earth girl whatsherface, I have to keep telling people you're not another Max Damage."
Slade blinked. Then he blinked again. The whole line of direction this conversation was suddenly taking was so unexpected, he didn't even get angry. "Pardon?" Some background might help here. Slade didn't do relationships. He had been married once, to his former drill-sergeant in point of fact, but since that fell-apart and it had become clear he couldn't have it both ways, he had made no effort to attempt anything like a committed relationship, or indeed any sort of relationship whatsoever. He was too withdrawn and inward-focused, obsessed with self-improvement to make any such commitment unless it furthered himself in some way, and as he always said, he was deadliest alone.
Deadool hadn't expected to get this far, and floundered a little, trying to think of where to go with it. "It's a matter of appearances, and rumor. And whatever makes a good story. I mean, not an actual story, but the sort of bull**** people talk, you know? Hang on, I'm not explaining this very well. Think I got some finger puppets somewhere in here..."
He takes finger-puppets and starts demonstrating something. What exactly he expected Slade to get out of it is unknowable, but it seems to make sense to him, and involved lots of wiggling. Why he carries around finger-puppets in his pouches is a big enough question on it's own.
Slade sighed. He closed his eye again for a long moment, and took a deep breath. Then he looked at his brother. "Look, Wade, I know you're trying to help me in your way. But shut up. And I don't need any distractions in my life right now."
"Distractions. Yeah, it would be a real tragedy if there was someone to interrupt all your working-out and brooding. How would you get anything done?" Deadpool replied, sarcastically, putting the finger-puppets away given he no longer needed visual aids. The two had a close, if bizarre, bond, and Wade honestly did want to help his brother. The problem was, he's the last person on any world who should be giving advice. "Seriously. Meet people. Treat yourself to a long vacation. Attend a convention or two, hook up with some young..."
"I mean it." Iron crept into Slade's tone. When he spoke like that, you either did what he said or got ready for a fight.
"Well have it your way." Deadpool said, exasperated, crossing his arms and looking out the window to sulk. It was really boring. There was nothing to look at but mile after mile of snow, trees, snow, rain, snow, road, and also snow.
"I don't get why you're up for this. I mean, you always make a big deal about not actually killing targets unless it's safe, to avoid dangerous people going after you for revenge that you can't handle."
"Sometimes you have to take risks." Slade replied noncommittally. He was still terse about the last conversational subject.
"So how are we going to actually kill him? I mean, put him in the ground, not just beat him up. In case you haven't noticed, he's A-list, and as awesome as we both are, A-list guys never get killed off for good."
"I've got a few tricks. Leave that to me."
"Seriously, this all screams expendable antagonist. Name one A-list guy you've killed permanently." Deadpool challenged. "And I mean world famous."
"Adrian Vedit, formerly known as Ozymandius. '93, knife to the solar plexus." Slade said. "First job I ever did for Luthor." It was a simpler time back then. The anti-mutant hysteria was only beginning, the super-heroes hadn't really gotten organized, and the world had seemed an endless potential.
Deadpool blinked. "Really? Luthor killed Ozymandius? I had no idea. But now the truth is exposed, and sweet perversion Batman, that's indecent!"
"Pays the bills." Slade replied, ignoring the unusual phrase at the end.
"OK, so that's pretty impressive, but even so…"
"Don't you have anything better to do?"
"No I don't, as a matter of fact. I'm practically reduced to inventing imaginary friends in order to keep my sanity and not go mad from the isolation." Deadpool pouted. He was just reaching for the radio to try and find a station to listen to where the static was less objectionable, when he saw a blur of something out of the corner of his eye. Something white. But when he turned to look, it was gone.
The engine gave a cough, then a splutter. "Not good." Slade said suddenly. The jeep's engine crackled then died completely. They rode to a halt in the shade of some black-trunked pine trees. Slade turned the key a few more times, but the engine only coughed and spluttered and refused to live.
Deadpool clambered out of his seat, and hurried around the front of the truck to pop the hood. Slade followed him patiently.
Wade looked down, tapped a few things and made sucking noises, trying to give the impression that it all meant something to him, then turned to Slade. "If you ask me, we should try to fill it with bananas. I don't think anyone's tried that before, so who's to say it won't work? So what do you think?"
"In all the time we've known each other, what gives you the impression that I have the slightest idea how to fix a car's engine?" Slade replied with a shrug. "I can about switch a tire."
"Oh come on. I've seen you build robots and complex explosives, and gadgets at least as cool as Batmans. How much harder can this be?"
Slade only shrugged. When it came to advanced technology, Slade preferred stealing or coercing from others. "Do you see a fully stocked workshop anywhere around here?"
"Well don't look at me! As a problem solver I pretty much shoot things and stab things. And while we can keep that in reserve, I don't think my methods will motivate the engine to start again." Deadpool said, drawing a magnum that looked like it had just come off the set of a western, and cocking back the hammer. "Hey, isn't this a rental? Oh, you are so losing your deposit."
Slade growled. "We don't need this. It will be dark soon, and we're a hundred miles from anywhere." The sky above was still clear and pale, but the heavy shadow of the hills ahead was fast approaching as the sun sank.
"Hey, relax, nothing scarier in these big bad woods then you or I. I even brought beer, so we can look at the stars and do some male-bonding. Hey, want to see me tempt fate?" Deadpool cleared his throat. "What's the worse that could happen?" The close woodland around them became heavy and mauve. The shadow was close now, and the feeble sunlight had turned the heavy clouds crimson as the sun slunk below the horizon.
Slade stood up straight. He was alert, tightly coiled, straining for a sound, eye darting hither and yon, trying to fix on movement.
Deadpool leaned casually against the jeep. "Relax. I did it ironically. I think we're safe."
A deep roar cut the air, a predatory howl that echoed through the cold glades. Twilight enclosed them. In the dark thickets nearby, something massive was moving closer.
"This is totally not my fault."

Wilson Brothers #6

Spoiler

Show

The temperature began to drop sharply as night set in. Somewhere, a twig broke and leaves rustled. The distant calls echoed again. Boughs shook, shivering leaves. saplings splintered. It sounded as though a tank was shouldering in from the outer woods. A dreadful, blubbering roar whooped out of the dark.
The Wendigo curse was laid down long before recorded history, afflicting anybody who resorts to cannibalism. But once it had a carrier, it spread. Every decade or so they'd have to be culled, or they'd become too powerful and rampage, slaughtering and consuming everything they found, devouring entire cities. This was a big one, an old one who'd probably never been human. It's fur was white and shaggy, although it was so matted by filth and viscera it was almost impossible to tell. Bones sharpened it's face into a confusion of misshapen angles, and a mass of slavering fangs the size and shape of chisels. The rest of it's twisted frame bulged with knots of muscle. Even it's claws and teeth showed an unnatural health. They gleamed in the dark like seasoned ivory. It's chest was wide as an elephants, although the ribcage beneath it had obviously been shattered and badly reset, time after time. But for all the broken symmetry of it's hunch-backed build, the thing moved with an eery grace.
They could smell it, smell the rancid sweat-stink of its mass, smell the sour blood and meat rotting in it's vast maw. It growled again, holding itself low so that it could get a good look at it's prey, then let out a deafening, trumpeting roar, exhaling bad air and blood vapor in a mighty gust.
Deadpool stared at the Wendigo as it lopes slowly towards them, closing the distance deceptively fast. "I have a plan." he announced boldly. "Don't make any sudden moves until I say. Then you step forward and try to befriend it, and I'll run."
Slade smiled beneath his mask, and stepped back to the car, groping about. "What are you talking about? This is better than Christmas!"
It charged them then, bounding forward on four limbs as often as two, thundering like an elephant.
Slade found his gun, turned, and opened fire in a single, smooth movement.
"Wow, it sure is lucky that your arms dealer was having his semi-anual, lazy story-telling, free instant delivery deal." Wade said from the sidelines. "No, wait, I tell a lie, we got these guns and explosives from Luthor. Gee, it was so much easier when I had my thought captions to keep track of things and I didn't have to say everything aloud."
Conventional weaponry had not kept up with genetic engineering. Particularly considering most of the results were not replicable, as much a result of circumstance as human understanding, and those who did come up with something that could be used to destroy an entire city, inevitably found that the only market for them were, for the most part, people mad enough to want to attack someone who could push over a sky-scraper. There were exceptions, Destro had a roaring trade in the sort of black market firepower for anyone mad enough to take on the more extreme metahuman, inbetween stealing his competitors technology and selling it to terrorists, and provoking wars to sell technology to both sides of the conflict, but most people kept things conventional. An ordinary kinetic weapon was nice, but Slade was as dedicated to being well-armed as he was to keeping in shape. Which was why what he pulled out was entirely custom-built and one-of-a-kind. It was big, and bore a passing resemblance to a snub-nosed Sub-Machine gun. Except it was three times the size, had three clips, and fired proportionately big bullets.
Nitro express cartridge with a velocity of two thousand F.P.S and a striking energy of four tons. A clip of seventy, and a rate of ten bullets a second. There was little that could withstand that sort of firepower. Unfortunately, what he was fighting was such a creature. Certainly, the monster's flesh tore, burst and exploded. Grave wounds ripped across it's torso and upper arms, and two deep dents appeared in it's forehead.
But it didn't seem to care. It didn't seem to notice. It just kept up it's loping charge, smashing towards the mercenary, coming through the woods like an avalanche.
The thing brought it's arms down on Slade, giving him nowhere to go. Blocking would have broken bones, but he knew he could place his hands on the inside of it's massive wrists and roll its hits away. It's jaws snapped at him, and when he hit it with the but of the gun it closed around it, ripping the gun from his hands and shearing through the steel with ease.
Apparently, it wasn't going to make it easy for him. He drove his fist into where it's kidney should be, and felt as though he'd just tried to demolish a mountain with his bare hands, breaking a few of the bones in the process.
It batted at him again, and Slade ducked under it, one of the Wendigo's huge paws, claws extended, whistling over his head and missing him by inches. It was fast and strong, but fought entirely by instinct. It was so fast and strong, that it had never had to learn how to really fight. Slade drew the desert eagle he wore at his hip, and fired every shot into the side of the monster's skull as he backed away, hitting it in the ear hole. The thing didn't even feel them, they bounced off it's skin without so much as a scratch to show for it. They really built them sturdy up here.
Shaking it's large, sloping head, the Wendigo turned to look at him with it's glinting, piggy eyes.
Clip out. Another in his pocket. Half a second to load, not that it made a bit of difference. Small arms fire wasn't going to do a thing, besides waste ammunition. He knew it, but he kept it up anyway, if only to keep it's attention focussed on him. This time he went for the eyes. It irritated them and shook it, but not enough. Not nearly enough.
The thing lifted itself to it's full height, rearing up, raising an arm so thick, so corded with muscle that one blow would pulp every bone in his body. It fixed it's gaze on him, It's eyes red and swollen but still quite usable, then brought it's fist smashing down in a clumsy but deceptively quick move. Slade waited until the last moment, then dived aside, turning it into a tightly controlled roll and back on his feet in a moment. The ground shook a little at the impact, and the monster scooped up a bucket of mud from where he'd been standing moments before. It roared again, a raging, phlegmy rattle, this time in frustration, then glared at him again.
Slade opened fire, the bullets slamming into its throat. Heavy, hard, a serious and sustained assault. He might as well be hurling insults for all the good it was doing, but he kept it up. Any moment now...
Deadpool suddenly appeared in midair behind the Wendigo, propelled by a jump that must have required a run up. He seemed to hang suspended for a moment, frozen in place, before landing astride it's hunched back with a grunt of effort, and grabbing hold of it's mane with his free hand for purchase. The monster shook and buckled, trying to shake the man off it's broad back. But Deadpool clung on, and drove the sword into it. It wasn't an ordinary sword, one of the two he usually carried around, which was just as well. No matter how fine, an ordinary blade would have done nothing at all, except maybe shatter on the monsters ridiculously durable and sturdy body. No matter how sharp, they wouldn't have been sharp enough.
But this was a special sword, one of two weapons they'd been given to kill a man who had so far proven unkillable. This was the previous property of a mutant called Scott Summers, entrusted to him by Wolverine, and acquired with some difficulty. The amplified blade was magical in nature, monomolecular, and cut cleanly into the monster's body. If he'd hit the backbone Wade was sure he'd have severed it, and chances are he'd have killed or crippled the beast. Unfortunately, he didn't quite manage that.
The Wendigo let out a mournful wail of pain that shook it's entire body, then turned back to find out what had hurt it so. A copious amount of black, stinking blood gushed out of the deep punctures that Wade had put in it's back.
Deadpool hung on for dear life to the handle of his sword, flapping around as it shook itself, trying to dislodge the source of it's pain. Then he let go as it slammed it's back against a tree, splintering the trunk and knocking it over with a groan of tortured wood, and driving the sword even deeper into it's body, as Wade let go and slipped through it's legs with sensational agility. Then one of it's arms clipped him, sending him flying to smack wetly against another tree with an audible crunch of breaking bone.
"Hurts…" He let out, his chest appearing deflated as his broken rib had punctured a lung. "Talking like… Shatner…"
The beast opened it's mouth. The stink hit him like a body-slam. It was going to lunge forward, a biting strike. Wade was almost immortal, but he was petty sure when those huge killing jaws snapped forward and closed it would be lights out forever.
"Kiss me, Harvey." He said, figuring at least his last words would be memorable, then blinked, as it abruptly flailed, and fell hard on it's face, as if it had tipped as well. It landed so suddenly that it's lower jaw smashed into the loam and slammed it's gaping mouth shut. It had come down less then a meter from Wade's outstretched feet.
It wasn't even slightly dead. It thrashed and roared, reaching with it's huge arms, its maw snapping and slicing the air. Deadpool scrambled backwards out of reach, and fumbled for his gun. Why had it fallen down? Why the hell had it fallen down?
And why in the name of Stan Lee had it's roaring, bellowing sound become so wretched, so shrill, so in pain?
Before he could try to get his thoughts straight, the Wendigo heaved itself again in a mighty surge, rising on massive arms, muscles bulging, veins prominent like cables. Curds of foam glistened on it's drawn lips. It lunged at Deadpool.
Deadpool finally got his pistol out of the holster, and fired into it's gullet, watching as silver darts punctured the ribbed, pink roof of it's mouth. He realized belatedly that he'd grabbed the wrong one. It was loaded with tranquilizers. Admittedly, darts that could crack an engine block, but not much use in this instance.
He dropped the gun, and gave up, when the Wendigo quivered, spasmed, convulsed, and then fell over on it's side with a jolt that seemed to rock the ground.
An almost silence fell. The only noise was the last tremulous breathes rattling phlegmatically in and out, before it gave a last gurgle, then stopped. It was dead. Really dead, it would probably be hard to be more dead without special training.
Slade switched off his quarterstaff, both ends stopping the menacing glow they had exhibited when he'd driven it into the base of it's skull and cut of it's vertebrae, and stepped out from behind it, reaching down and hauling Deadpool to his feet.
"OK, how come you killed it and I just made it mad? And why did you wait so long to intervene? It could have killed me!"
"I killed it first, didn't I?" Slade replied. "Before it chomped on you."
"And how did you do that? I used the magic sword and it only got pissed off."
"Not the weapon. It's how you use it."
"Oh, very mature. Going to take out your **** and measure that too?"
Slade ignored the profanity. Wade fell silent, as he realized he'd just articulated a profanity, rather then the usual collection on meaningless symbols. "It's just an animal. It has anatomy, and so it has weakness. It has hamstrings, so I cut them. It has a brain, so I cut it off. It wasn't vulnerable to a direct attack, so I hit it where it was weak."
"Yeah, yeah, save it for the next apprentice." Deadpool says, his body already more or less back in working order, if you called what he had working. The Cancer would kill him, and the Healing factor would overwhelm him and kill him as it rampaged out-of control through the vital systems of his body, and the only reason neither had yet was because they were too busy fighting each other to actually finish the job, if anything disturbed that, he'd die. As long as nothing did, he'd survive anything. "You know, I didn't have to save you. I was going to just teleport away, but then I remembered I wanted to see how my new sword works."
"Not bad, I'd say." Slade replied, pulling the blade out of it's back. Thick, dark blood squirted out, hitting Slade like a pressure hose. Even covered in blood and gore, the sword gleamed. It had punctured a kidney, Slade noted. The thing would have died eventually from Deadpools blow, if given long enough. He handed it back to Wade, then turned to the Wendigo to make sure it wasn't getting up. Apparently, frying it's nervous system had done the trick. It's wounds weren't closing, though given the steady rate of blood loss, it's heart was still beating, which shouldn't be possible. Then again, it was a magical creature. Who knew with them? Perhaps it would eventually get back up.
Slade spat on it's corpse, then hefted his staff meaningfully. "Waste of time." He said, disappointed at how unsatisfying the diversion had been, then trudged back to the car, and looked down at the engine, which had cooled long since. Then he closed the hood, walked into the seat, and tried again.
The jeep made a nasty grinding sound, then roared to life. The engine sounded decidedly unhealthy, but it was running.
"Well that's convenient. Apparently, us trapped in the wilderness isn't interesting once we've done some with the violence, so things are being arranged to move along. This medium really doesn't do periods of waiting between periods of excitement so well."
Slade ignored that, because it sounded like Wade was talking to his imaginary friends again. Wade continued addressing the readers who always followed him around everywhere, wanting to observe his life. Shameless hero worship.
"Now that we got the side story out of the way, lets go find and kill Wolverine, and you can tell me why this is so important to you."
"I told you to drop it." Slade growled.
"And I ignored you. Duh."

I've used the first chapter before, but I've modified reconed it since, given their change of targets and what direction the story has. I'm fairly happy with it, though there's a surfeit of violence. Only 50% of them contain any at all, and a third of that is against robots, but don't worry, it picks up later. Indeed, I only threw in the Wendigo because it seemed like blasphemy not to give them something to hit after so much talking. And fortunately, I had Deadpool to talk about how contrived the whole thing was. Luckily for me, he doesn't judge.
One of the more interesting bits is the banter, as the two of them act very differently around each other then they do amongst company. See, Deadpool brings out the best in Slade, and Deathstroke brings out the worst in his brother. And they're family, so they've got a lot of shared history, inside jokes and the like.
I'll leave them for now, on the cusp of confronting their enemy, and take on another arc while I wait for everyone else to catch up a bit. Might do Heroes for hire (Danny Rand is my boy), or maybe do Daredevil (which, you have to admit, sounds awesome), or perhaps even Birds of Prey (Can I assume Elektra, Psyloche and Susan Storm are members?).

[Draxx]

Awesome. Thanks a lot Darkblade, that's really helpful. And great work, Cracklord. Though Luthor is moving a little fast, don't you think? I like a lot of your details and references, hell, I even like Slade having murdered Ozymandius in '97. So good work all round. If you want to swap for a while, make it Heroes for Hire or Birds of prey.

As for international heroes, with the exception of Britain (because I happen to like Brian Brandock and a few of the other members of the team) none of the international factions will be particularly important in my story-line, at least until the end. But I still want to establish that they are there, as quickly as possible.
One point, I figure that the Heroes de Paris are one of the toughest and most effective and powerful teams out there, explaining why there's no supercrime to speak of in France.

[Cracklord]

Very well then.

Luke Cage, Danny Rand, Misty Knight, Colleen Wing and Jeryn Hogarth reporting for duty hire (it ain't free).
Can I add other characters I want as it becomes needed?

[Colesign]

Good to see that the Forum's back up.

Here's the stories for the setting I've completed so far, Darkblade

The Fae War:

Spoiler

Show

Night lay upon the face of the Nevernever...a night so perfect and blazing in the beauty of it's stars and the howling swirling of visible wind that Van Gogh would fee the need to tear apart his work and start from scratch at the mere sight of it.

And then that night was riven...WITH FIRE!

Explosions stitched their way across the landscape below, in the hills and deep valleys and peaks and tall forests, and in the tumbling air above, as swarms of flying creatures blotted out the sky and their lords and ladies cast down their fire and ice in equal measure. In the distance the spear of Lugh was hurled, devastation following in the wake of it's arc. Great Giants and Ogres, exposed to the stinging smoke of the Brew of Balor, opened their blazing, swollen eyes with bars of bronze and scorched the landscape with beam of pure elemental fire and destruction!

Golden machine-men of clockwork and gears advanced, swinging swords and shields, and were mashed to pieces, shattered, melted...and then they slowly reassembled themselves. Arrows crossed the sky in droves like gnats bleeding a greater foe to death with numbers and persistence, and eldritch sorceries turned whole swathes of the land and air to howling blizzards, roaring tornadoes, overgrown choking vine jungles and jagged crevices where the earth itself had been riven from terrible quakes.

And in retaliation the opposing force desperately fought back with all the weapons and training developed by the Ka-Tet Corporation and all the marvelous technology developed by the 'Super-Science' of the Green System! Seeker Missiles, Conversion Warheads, X-plosive bullets, aerial drones, point defenses, and the 'Fae-Killer' warhead, the famed Allotropic Iron Torpedo, were all hurled with equal disdain at the immortal foes that swarmed forth over the land, shredding mystic flesh with the cold metal that shaped mortal ingenuity and cold disdain.

And from mounted projectors and tripod-deployed semi-portables, a multi-colored assortment of ravening beams, tubes, rays, needles, and daggers of energy shot forth at luminal speeds, stitching their ways across the countryside and through the air, leaving charred, utterly disintegrated ruin in it's wake. Great airships, powered dirgibles, and swooping spheres made of transparent, utterly durable arenak and powered by the sum energy latent within disintegrating bars of copper took to the skies to hold the enemy back, their weapons weaving a symphony of annihilation through the very ether of the Nevernever itself...

But the immortal denizens of this accursed dimension were not to be so easily outdone! And as the moon loomed overhead, it's Selenite denizens brought the full might of bright Luna to bear upon the aerial champions of the Order, and as moonbeams wafted downward, many brave ships, atmospheric and space alike fell burning out of the sky. And on the ground men fought: armored and unarmored, with weapons of fierce vibratory destruction, and of proven, reliable bullets and blades.

Fought, killed, and died in equal measure.

And floating above, in the very Nexus of the of the defensive effort of the Last Order, in a gleaming spire of transparent purple monopolium and prog-matter that tapped into both the latent power of the atom and the unique background energy of celestial radiation that pervaded the Nevernever, in this grand flagship's central control station, men, women, and non-gendered sentients worked frantically at their stations, commanding, coordinating, and attempting to direct an impossible defense in a war too complex to be even fully comprehended!!!

“Cold Plasma Barrier disrupted! Inner shielding radiating into the ultraviolet range!”

“Damage to the Wall shield! Monopolium layer compromised!”

“First Battalion! Hold your position at all costs! Allocating Projectors Alpha-1 through 50 for supporting fire!

“Sir! 75th Kondalian Warband reports breach in their line! Their physiologies can't take the blizzard cold! Reasonable Men moving in to contain breakthrough!”

“Flying Circus “Valiant” is being decimated! Some sort of drill based weapon! Sweat Lord, it's a flying drill weapon!”

“Delta One, Repeat! Confirm Report of Nightgaunt swarms! Delta One? Delta One, come in!”

At the main command station, a sweating man in a unbuttoned Tet military jacket, and a holstered Colt .45, slammed his fist against a brass panel, one fortunately unadorned with sensitive buttons!

“Damnit! Damnit! The Pointy-Eared bastards aren't stopping for ****! How are we supposed to fight against them like this? How?”

“How? How? By fighting until they die, of course!” A deep baritone voice boomed out, as a green-skinned, black-haired, well-framed biped dressed in loose leggings and large amounts of jewelry, arm bracelets, bands, and chains walked forward with solid, thumping steps punctuated by the loud metal clinking of his adornments.

“Don't you know that this is war? By the First Cause, I can barely stand you humans! So lily-livered and easily frightened! You remind me of a bowl of mush–you wade around in slush clear to your ears! Get this through your head: this will end only with the complete and utter extermination of these 'Fair Folk', or we ourselves will fall! So grit your teeth, you sentimental fool!”

“Dunark!” cried out a voice belonging to a a hooded, cloaked figure, entering the main command deck with the clicking of boots and the jangling of a belt filled with loose tools, hands clasped behind his back. “Don't go knocking sentimental fools! Some of my best friends are sentimental fools! What's the situation!”

“The enemy keeps coming, Overlord!” Dunark replied, teeth bared in a fierce animalistic grin. “Death doesn't frighten them: Heh, I could almost admire them for it!”

He faced flushed dark, and his nostrils flared.

“But their damned Winter Nobles are making mincemeat of my Kondalian Commandos! By the First Cause, If I'd known they were so genetically inferior I would have sterilized them long ago!”

“Ah, **** you, space Nazi, and may it do ya fine!” The Tet Commander interjected, glaring at the Green System Overlord, and thumbed the army-wide comm channel!

“To all Knights! Hold the line with all your strength! Keep hope and show your courage, and we will keep the Fae from breaking through to the borders of Leng! Remember the Face of Your Father!”

A feral grin broke out on Richard Seaton's own face, and he threw back the hood of his cloak to reveal his flight jacket and Hawaiian shirt. “Well said, Colonel! Director Hellboy's taught you well!”

“Thankee Sai. You might say his knack for inspiration runs in his blood, 'Overlord'.” The Tet man replied curtly, tongue deliberately stumbling over the word 'Overlord'.

“Now if you'll excuse me– You there!” He shouted, striding over to a bridge officer. “Get me in touch with the New Wardens! They need to open a Way to the London Knights, stat!”

Dunark sniffed as the Tet man walked off “So where have you been, ****?” He inquired levelly, walking over to a weapons station and depressing a plunger, discharging a wave of vibratory destruction upon a distant hillside

“Oh. Places. With Kane and Ramirez. Behind enemy lines.” Seaton drawled, and held out an empty palm. A flourish, and that palm was suddenly holding a small glass armilary sphere: at it's center there rested a green-tinted copper needle that swiveled back and forth in place.

Dunark's eyes glittered. “You stuck a trace on someone. Who?”

Seaton winked. “Nuada's puppet Fairy Queen.”

Dunark went still. “Ahhhhhh–” He said with delicious anticipation. “Cut off the head, eh?”

“Cut off the sock puppet, more like.” Seaton clarified, juggling the object compass back and forth in his hands. “The sock puppet that happens to possess a huge fraction of Summer's power, and who is infusing her damned fairy footsoldiers with her will, her conceit...”

A ugly snarl crossed his face. “They seek to reclaim their glory, their place in the universe by destroying us? Such arrogance!!!”

He closed his fist over the object compass and clenched.

“I'll resolve them into their constituent particles!!!!”

With an swift nod that resembled a stabbing motion, Dunark turned to the command deck crew and raised his hand.

“Prep engines for acceleration! Energize the 5th Order Projectors, signal Ironheade to begin their concert, and prepare for sortie!”

Doctor Richard Seaton, Chemist, Scientific Genius, Overlord of the Green System, and Knight of the Dark Tower, strode forward towards the tactical visiplates, eyes narrowing as he beheld the view of the chaos of war within the Nevernever. He crossed his arms over his chest.

“Skylark of Gilead! Accelerate!”


%%%

The Nightside.

It's the secret heart of London, a place of delight and damnation in equal measure, a place of vice and glitz and seedy glamour, marvels and obscenities, that you can end up in with just one wrong turn down a dark filthy alley or getting on the wrong train in the underground, where you can buy sin on a Shiskabab from a traveling vendor and snarf it down in one bite with a hint of alien spices, but you'd best watch out because angels are dancing on the head of the skewer, and they'll give you splinters and tear into your tongue like the fires of hell, and best not go to the nearest hospitals, because things are never as they seem in the Nightside, and those hospitals might just turn out to be living nightmarish organic slurry making demon chameleons–ah hell, it's the Nightside, every house is an abomination looking to devour your soul!

It's the Nightside.

I'm John Taylor, and I've got a Gift for Finding Things. In the Nightside.

The Dark Heart of London.

I used to be a private investigator. But then I wound up fighting my mother the biblical myth and won...and became a legend.

While still being a private investigator. And then my surrogate father tricked me into killing him and I got saddled with his job as Walker, the Man in charge of the Nightside.

Which happens to be the Dark Heart of London.

Then I got hired to guard a young girl named Door, and got sucked into a vast and ridiculous quest to save the whole of infinite creation from the depredations of a horrible young adult author and her twisted bishie vampire creations, and now I am a Knight, sworn to protect the Dark Tower from the bastards that would try to exploit it or bring it toppling down.

**** got ridiculous.

It's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it. But if you stop by London, feel free to look me up if you need something found.

In the Nightside. The Secret Heart of London

But back then, I wasn't in the Nightside. I was wandering about the Nevernever, right smack dab in the middle of Faerieland, running for my life, keeping pace with Hellboy, World's Greatest Occult Detective, and the wizard Carlos Ramirez, known as the Warden, being chased by a bunch of movie monsters.

"I REALLYYYY HATE FETCHESSSSS!" Ramirez shouted as he dashed through thick, bramble-fileld woods with twisted branches, a ghost-faced slasher, irradiated zombie, and a screw-headed pastyface with clanking chains followed behind us.

He turned to me, teeth very, very obviously clenched.

"AND YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE EVEN MORE THAN FETCHESSSSS????" He drawled as he turned around and hurled a searing beam of green energy behind him, a green bolt than turned everything behind us to dust and sand.

"THAT'S RIGHT:MAGIC RESISTANT FETCHES!!!!!!" Ramirez confirmed. "THEY'RE JUST A BARREL OF LAUGHS, AREN'T THEY?"

"Sure they are, kid: nobody–Oof– nobody here likes this crap!" Hellboy grunted, turned around and firing his large revolver behind him at our pursuers, the shots going wide. "We need to figure something out."

"I've got an idea." I said, tucking my hands into my coat pockets. "I think I can use my Gift to find the source of their power, and–"

"No." Ramirez growled.

"If I can open my Private Eye, my mother's dark inheritance–"

"No. Just No." Ramirez growled again, pointing an accusing finger at me. "We are not doing that!"

"Why not?"

"Because it's stupid! You're stupid! You're always like 'Ooh, scary monster! I'll just use my Gift to instantly find it's weak spot and blow it up!' What the heck kind of power is that? It's almost as bad as your salt fixation!"

"Salt is a useful substance!" I retorted.

"You're a useful substance!"

"Guys!" Hellboy shouted. "Fetches? Lots of them! Imminent death? Ringing any bells?"

"Gah! Sorry." Ramirez said, clutching his staff tight. "Um–we've got only one chance! I'll need to open a Way, and hope that it doesn't lead to our instant death!"

"Really? Doesn't sound all that great, if you don't mind me saying!" Hellboy replied.

"You got any better ideas?" Ramirez retorted, batting a incoming disembodied chain with a sickly green energy shield, and a spoke word.

"Ah, damn." Hellboy muttered. He looked at me. "You got any ideas, Taylor?"

I shoved my hand even deeper into my trenchcoat pockets.


"I think I can us my Gift to find the source of their hormone production and exploit it to induce a bout of unexpected Lactation–"

"Open It Now!"

"Right!!!!" Ramirez shouted, and gestured at the air in front of him with his staff, tearing at the veils between realities. A gap appear in midair, leading to somewhere dark. We dove through, and–

%%%

–smashed into a chilly metal wall, all of us cramped and pressed together in some kind of damp compartment.

"What the hell?" Hellboy snarled, looking around. "What's your status everyone?"

"Fine!" I shouted, picking myself up and looking around the place.

"I'll be fine as soon as the Right Hand of Doom could let me breath again please. The Warden wheezed, a knuckle from the instrument of disruption smooshing his face against the riveted porthole.

As it turned out, we were all suddenly stuck inside a bathysphere. I fairly large and baroque bathysphere, but a bathysphere all the same, with all of the crampedness you'd think would happen if you were stuck in a Bathysphere. There was a series of lights outside which showed us descending slowly down a underwater tunnel, a cloud of bubbles billowing up past the window as we sank deeper and deeper into the ocean.

As we were trying to untangle ourselves, a series of runes carved into the steel walls of the Bathysphere began glowing with a lurid red hue, and a crystal ball descended from a panel in the ceiling.

"What the hell?" I muttered.

"Get back!" Hellboy barked.

Where?" Ramirez asked.

"Shhh!"

The Crystal flickered, and suddenly the image of a man sprang into lives. A muscular, bearded man, with sharp, aloof features, dressed in a shepherd's vest, a sharp keen bladed sword strapped to his side. And a very, very, very serious expression on his face, as he stood behind a a blood red banner with a skull symbol on it...next to a rich leather armchair, a pipe clenched between his teeth.

He opened his mouth.

“I...am Richard Rahl.

And I am here to Ask You a Question.

Is a Man Not Entitled to Moral Clarity?”

NOOOOO! Says the man in the Midlands. Morality is relative!

NOOOOOooooOOOoooOOOO!!!!!!!!!!! Says the Sisters of the Light: Morality is Made by the Creator!

….

….

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!! Says the man from the Imperial Order: morality serves the needs of everyone!

I...Rejected those answers. Instead. I chose something different. I Chose The Impossible!!! I Chose–

–D'HARAPTURE!!!!!!!!

Where the sculptor would not be constrained by the censor! Where the wizard would not be constrained by secret religious societies! Where Reason! Would Not Be Constrained by Stupidity!

And with your Moral Clarity...D'harapture can become your underwater city as well.”

The image flicked off, and we beheld the city of 'D'harapture'.

We stared for a moment. Ramirez broke the silence.

“John...even though I am nowhere near British, I'm going to go ahead and ask you if I can borrow your native vocabulary for a moment.”

“Permision granted.

“Oh Bollocks.”

[Colesign]

And the Seaton Trauma Cycle (With a Guest Star at the End)

Spoiler

Show

In the Centaurus Spiral Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, nestled within a Nebulae of shimmering stardust, within the clusters of the seventeen emerald stars of the Green System, on the Planet Normalon, Dorothy Seaton and Richard Jr. were building a starship so that they could search for their mutual husband and father.

Normalon! A gentle planet, one that bore the marks of a triumphant Civilization, of evolved beings dedicated completely to the the ideals of Scientific Pursuit and peaceful meditation. Where each adult was the complete master of a field of science, knowledge imbued within them by cunning systems of education and the instant electronic imprinting of the total knowledge of their ancestors upon maturity. From the cradle to the grave, the Normalonians lived rationally calculated and quantifiably fulfilling lives.

And at some point, they had slipped into stagnation, and misplaced that spark, that drive which propels the younger more reckless races outward from their home...and leads to wonder and Sheer Astonishment!

When Richard Seaton unified the four species of the Green System, the warlike Kondals and Urvanians, the Porpoise-Men of Dasor and academic Normalonians...it was the best thing that had happened to those dusty elders of a gentle race for eons. They were faced with challenges once more, in new scientific paradigms, in mitigating the savagery of their planetary cousins, and in defending the universe from a thousand would-be galactic empires.

Thus the Normalonians were more than happy to help Dorothy build a packet-style spaceship to help search for her husband.

Dorothy stood on a balcony and watched as it took shape in the launch cradle, a thin spire of gleaming purple-transparent monopolium and programmable matter.

She had written out the designs on classic foolscap, the contents of which lay scattered at her feet. The 'Starling' was designed with three things in mind: Engine power, defensive fields, and an enhanced sensor array, able to pick out a ship's energy signature from the core of a galaxy and project hard-light constructs across lightyears, able to take hits and run fast.

It's the same old story for a wife. Dorothy thinks. First you worry that your husband's a workaholic–which, to be fair, is something Seaton has a lot of trouble with–then you worry that he's abandoned you–which I couldn't help but imagine even though I know him really well–and then...

And then you worry that something's gone horribly wrong, and you call the police.

Except that there aren't any police out there who can track your Scientific Adventurer husband across the entirety of the known Cosmos.

...Dammit.

"Mom! Mom!"

Dorothy turned about to see Richard Jr. waft up the nearby repeller tube, dressed in swim trunks, soaking wet...and carrying a Normalonian green-skinned, subtly large-brained youth, whose left arm was dangling limply.

"Richard, what happened!" Dorothy asked, rushing over to her son's side.

"I..." Richard Jr. averted his eyes for a moment. "It was an accident. Dacel and Foros and Theti and I were playing in the distilled water pool...and I was playing with Dacel and...I hurt him by mistake."

Richard Jr. stared at the ground, looking at the gleaming brass vambraces fixed around his slender arms, the 6th Order Inhibitors that his father had quickly thrown together before blasting off for Earth to 'Put things in Order'.

It was only because of those two small pieces of apparel that Richard Jr. was able to grow and get along like a normal boy, filling out in size and gaining a bit more of his Father's features in a heart-aching fashion. But there were only a stopgap measure, a temporary measure for until Richard Seaton returned to fully cure his son of his...contagion.

Dorothy could still remember her utter helplessness at that time...snatched by tattooed commandos from her cheap flat in a strange, vulgar, bleak, and hostile future...being beaten and humiliated, and brought in chains to the temple of Chichen Itza and the Court of the Red Queen , a cold, evil, black-eyed cobra whose capered amongst a menagerie of insane bat monsters.

She remembered Seaton's Projection materializing, the tears in his eyes, struggling to keep it together as that bitch put a bayonet to her son's throat...the steely glint in his eyes as he began to put together a plan to safe them...and then the horror as his Projection was disrupted by the electronic war field of the Invading Britannians...as everything fell into chaos...and as a vampire guard, overcome by bloodlust, sank his teeth into her son's shoulder...

"Mom? Mom? Do you know where we can find a medkit? I...I want to make up for my screwup...by fixing Daxel's arm...can I do that for you, Daxel? I mean, if Mom lets me?"

"It's okay." the green skinned youth said, smiling: "I know it was an accident: you're a Heavy Worlder, and you're used to things being more durable: I've blocked out the pain with a mental technique I designed at age twenty, and with proper treatment, the fracture could heal fully. Besides...you don't know medicine: the First of Healing should take care of it."

"I know." Richard Junior said glumly, rubbing his face. "But...I need to help somehow. I need to do something good to make up for the bad. That's what good guys do!"

"Like your dad?" Daxel asks.

Richard Jr. frowned. "I guess."

"How about this, okay?" Dorothy says, kneeling down so that she matched the heights of both her son and the Normalonian kid. "Go the the First of Healing with Daxel, but then ask the First if you can help him tend to Daxel's arm: I'm sure he'll have something he could use your help with."

"Cool!" Richard Jr. and Daxel said simultaneously. With the rapid shifting of focus that's endemic to youth, they swiveled about and walked off towards one of the nearby hovercars, chattering about learning medicine, and talking excitedly about the rocket-ship taking shape far off in the launch cradle.

"I'm gonna be the Navigator! I'll plot courses and scan for stuff and everything!" Dorothy heard her son say.

"That's so scientific! Are you going to travel to Earth?"

"...Nah. Earth sucks."


To be continued! Will Dorothy Seaton be able to track down her missing Science Hero Husband? Will Richard Jr. be able to overcome his semi-vampiric condition! And what in all of the Cosmos has happened to Professor Seaton, Cosmic Explorer, Genius, and Champion of the Green System?

Tune in next week, for:

Terror of the Phyrexia Pirates!

%%%

The space-forsaken irony of if all was that the Starling's voyage ended only minutes after it began.

As Dorothy, Richard Jr., and a platoon of Kondalian Commandos blasted off in the slender craft, the sheer force generated from the disintegrating force of multiple uranium bars driving them out of the Green System at a speed compared to which the speed of light was but a snail's pace...

...their long range projections picked up the drive signatures of a spaceship. A large spaceship, a spaceship the size of a moon, lurking just outside the range of the planetary mass detectors of the Green System, in a parking orbit around a black hole and star double system, thick streams of plasma peeling off from the doomed sun and plummeting into that abyssal singularity of absolute negation.


The Skylark of Valeron! Dorothy thought. What caused Richard to pull that old bird out of hiding? Another alien menace? Have some Cloran remnants popped out of the woodwork? Or maybe it's the Pure Intellectuals! God, those ascended manchildren are so annoying...

...Why hasn't he contacted us? Is he hiding from us?

...blisters, don't let your worries keep you from acting!

"Set us on an Intercept Course." She said, staring at the visiplate projections and biting her lip. "Don't spare the power plants."

***

It was indeed the Skylark of Valeron, somehow dragged from it's hiding place in the Orion Nebulae and set in an orbit, a mass of machinery and power reactors and exciters and 6th Order Projectors, a moon-sized behemoth designed to blast it's way back from the far end of the universe and to imprison Ascended Beings, all it's functions guided by an Electronic Brain just barely below the threshold of intelligence, designed to work in tandem with it's pilot.

Matter and energy were merely building blocks to the mind that controlled it, all conjurable simply through the application of imagination and willpower, and limited only by one's power sources. And with several asteroid sized reactors burning huge blocks of uranium, and a Cosmic Energy Convertor that absorbed the energy of Cosmic Rays, the Valeron was not spoilt for power.

Dorothy looked at the dials at the control deck, frowning as she sorted through the alien measurements systems in her head.

That can't be right.

"Rovol." She asked, waving the young radiation technician over. "Do these reading mean what I think they mean?"

The newly instated First of Radiation scratched his head.

"This is quite curious...no, most curious indeed!!! The instruments are without error: the Valeron is currently drawing upon enormous amounts of energy!"

"And yet she's not moving." Dorothy said quietly. "He could be driving a Projection across a large amount of space..."

"There's no sign of any emanations from the Higher bands of Energy, though." Rovol remarked, scratching his large skull, eyes gleaming at the scientific mystery before him.

Dorothy forced her voice to remain calm. "And it's doesn't explain why he hasn't contacted us. Why he hasn't bothered to inform us that he's alive.

"Raise communications." She said crisply.

She grabbed a microphone, it's wire connection snaking out from the nearby console.

"Richard. Richard Seaton. Are you there?"

Silence on the end.

"Richard...dammit ****, if you're there please answer me! This is Dorothy!"

Silence. The Valeron made no attempt to shift it's position, nor did the power readings coming from it change in any way.

"****...talk to me if you're there. If you don't respond...I'm going to do something really, really stupid, you lug."

Silence. Then on the Etherwave receiver, a scratchy, hoarse voice rang out:

"...Dottie?" Richard said softly. "Dottie...what are you doing here? ....how did you find me, for that matter?"

"I looked. With this spaceship I built. It wasn't hard." Dorothy said beneath clenched teeth. The two contradictory emotions of knee-quivering relief, and lip quivering anger built up within her chest, and she finally gave vent to both there emotions at once.

"What in Sam Hill, have you been doing, Richard? And why the hell haven't you contacted us! I was near sick with worry and fit to go into a screeching fit, you've been gone so long! And Richard Jr! Leaving him to deal with his...condition on his own!"

She struggled to rein in her ire.

"...I'm willing to listen. But you better hope that your explanation for your complete and utter absence from our lives is a good one: what is it? Galactic Invasion? Trapped in a pocket dimension? Time travel? Space Brambles?"

"..."

"I was going to come back as soon as..." Richard's voice trailed off.

Dorothy blinked once. She rubbed her face, and then...

"I'm coming over: open the docking seals."

"Dottie, no! It's not safe!"

Dorothy paused, then thought things through, and smiled a bit.

"Whatever's wrong, it's something that you want to save my feelings from, the man keeping his secret from his wife to avoid damaging her constitution–you know, that schtick was old back in the 1920s."

"But whatever's going on," She continued, "It's obviously not too dangerous at the moment, or you'd be straightforward about it, and not all dancing around the topic. So here's how it is: let me in, or I'll blast my way in. Your ship's big enough: it can take it."

Dorothy paused, expecting a heated retort, or a precise scientific explanation of how the capabilities of the Valeron far exceeded that of her personal spacecraft.

"...Please don't come in." Richard said in a dull tone of voice. At the same time, lights lit up on the surface of the Skylark of Valeron, and the multiple docking doors slid open, huge pieces of machinery pushing aside plates of pure Isonon alloy, allowing the Starling to fly right in.

Dorothy felt a sinking feeling in her stomach.

When Richard Seaton folded on an argument that quickly...you knew something was wrong.

"Rovol." He said quietly. "Take Richard Junior to the Reactor hub and show him around. I need to speak with my husband alone first: I don't want anything to go wrong"

Rovol bowed. "If it be Graven Upon the Sphere, ma'am, it shall be done."

The First of Radiation left the command deck.

Dorothy groaned to herself quietly.

Then she straightened her head, stiffened her spine, and depressed several plungers and switches arranged in a fashion similar to the apparati of a Pipe Organ.

And the small, needle-like spaceship drifted in the the Skylark of Valeron's main docking bay.

The bridge of the Skylark of Valeron was a lovely little two story colonial house.

But of course, that was the point. At the core of that moon-sized battleship, complete mastery over the 6th Order Forces allowed anyone of sufficient scientific knowledge, will, and imagination to rewrite reality: matter and energy summoned up at will...and in the case of the bridge of Richard Seaton's greatest creation, he chose to recreate his countryside home, white painted, freshly shingled, with an eternal fresh spring breeze blowing from the west, and an eternal sunny day shinning down from above.

Or at least, that was how it used to be.

Not a large piece of machinery that reminded Dorothy Vaneman-Seaton of nothing less that a giant observatory telescope turned the wrong way around poked down from the heaven like God's finger, occupying the entire dome area and poking through the shingled roof of the two-story house, rubble and splinters of wood scattered across the yard where the giant device had presumably been ramned right through the roof.

Dorothy inhaled sharply.

What is going on? Think, you molly-coddled excuse for a heiress. Use some of that Super-Science you've picked up. It's some kinds of scanner...in fact, I think I recognize a neutronium Lens as part of it's workings. So it can analyze all type of energy and matter ranging up to the 5th Order of Radiation...and perhaps beyond. But what would it be scanning?

...I really hope this isn't some kind of trap. That would take the cake.

Dorothy pulled out an automatic pistol from one of her pocket, chambered a round. The rounds were purely ordinary jacketed lead: using an X-plosive bullet in such tight quarters would be a ticket to suicide.

She held the gun's barrel down at her side.

And then she walked up to the front porch, sidestepping a shattered wooden beam, and pushed open the door.

The main hallway was filled with sawdust and shattered glass. Dorothy stepped over the glass and followed the rubble right into the living area.

And there she found her husband, slumped in a chair, clothes so ragged that the sum total of their remaining fabric area wouldn't make up a thin jacket, hair tousled and shaggy, bathed in pale blue light as some of the most advanced machinery in existence whirred and whinned right over his head, the very tip of the scanner Dorothy had seen outside pointing right at her husband.

“Full Order Spectrum Scan Completed.” The Brain of the ship concluded in a level, polite tone. “No prescence of Contanimation detected. Results conclusive to the degree of 99.91 % assured accuracy.”

“Run it again.” Seaton rasped.

Dorothy stayed in the shadows, listening.

“Sir, we have run this test 987 times, and all these tests have been negative. The total possibility of testing error is now only .09%.”

“That's not enough.” Seaton said flatly, rubbing his face. “Keeping running the Scan until the possbility of error is at a nice, big, fat 0. You got that?”

“Sir, as I have stated earlier, achieving 100% accuracy is impossible–“

“Damn the ****ing impossible!” Seaton roared suddenly, surging to his feet. “I violated Relativity when I was twenty-five by accident!!! I've journeyed to the far end of the universe and back, beat down Gods, blown countless invincible star fleets out of the Ether! I've forged machine parts in the heart of a star, and unraveled the mysteries of the 4th Dimension! So why can't I tack a couple more decimals onto that 99.91 percent of yours!!! Do you know what could happen if you are wrong? Do you–“

Seaton slumped down into his chair, and picked up a headset from the ground at his feet, placing it over his head.

“We'll convert the analyzer of the Full-Spectrum Scanner into a dual-based Quantum Computing unit. That should increase the accuracy a bit more.”

“Affirmative. Sir, I think I should remind you that you have not eaten in–“

“I'll materialize the ATP right into my cells.” Seaton replied. “Now let's do this.”

Dorothy's mouth thinned into a tight line. Then she took several quiet steps back around the corner, and pitching her voice, called out:

“Richard! Richard, where are you?”

Dorothy heard a loud thump and clatter from around the corner, then a:

“It's okay! I'm right here! Hold on a second...”

Dorothy walked around the corner and into the living room. She saw Richard place the headset on a nearby table and frantically comb his hair into place.

In a matter of several seconds, Richard had used his Starship's power to shave his stubble, clean his hair, and restore his wardrobe to a clean-lined leather jacket jeans, and a Hawaian T-Shirt.

He tried to smile. Dorothy could tell it was meant to be a gentle, reassuring smile.

And he failed horribly at it. It took all of Dorothy Vaneman Seaton's formidable grit to down break down herself as her mind imagined all the foul things that could have affected her husband to this extent.

But she kept herself composed.

“Richard.” She said quietly.” Please tell me what happened.

Richard's travesty of a smile, faded, leaving a hollow-eyed, grey expression.

“I...” He walked over to a nearby couch, brushed the shattered glass off, and sat down.

“Dorothy, I know I was away for far too long...my God, is Richie alright? Is he...”

“He's fine.” Dorothy hastily confirmed. “Normalon was the best possible place for him, especially after Earth. He's...so like you. And those armbands of yours have been working just fine.”

The incident...she decided not to mention.

Richard let out a huff, and his shoulders straightened. “Thank God. I'm...glad to hear that. Dottie...”

He looked up at Dorothy.

“I'm so sorry I wasn't able to see you two...but believe me: it was truly, deeply, utterly for the best that I didn't come back until now.”

He inhaled and pressed his hands together with such a violent paroxysm of force that Dorothy could have sworn she heard bones grinding.

Then he exhaled and began to explain.

“I was roving beyond the Magellnics in the Skylark III, examining a piece of derelict machinery I'd found...a strange, non linear design...and I inadvertantly exposed myself to a...a strange contaminent.”

Richard's voice grew more level and measured as he went on.

“It had the consistency of engine grease. So I thought nothing of it...I...if I'd been more cautious, worn a pressure suit...in retrospect, it was a rather strange infectious agent, with characteristics similar to certain viruses and certain strains of Molecular Technology...but also some...mystical aspects to it, thought I hesitate to use that most unscientific term. Very very slowly, to the extent that my mind didn't pick it up, this agent began subverted my mental processes at the neurological level, subconciously influencing my engineering projects, which gradually aqquired a bizzare technological paradigm. By the time I noticed that something was wrong...the subverted portions of my mind were dictating the actions of my body, and even with my mental training and the support of those sub-personalities that remained unaffected, I was unable to orchestrate an effective resistance. Say Dottie, could you materialize some tea? Just like Shiro made it?”

Quietly Dorothy put on a nearby headset and thought. Two steaming mugs materialized, one in her hand and the other in Richard's hand. Dorothy sat down next to Richard, who flinched for a moment, then covered for it by sipping his tea and grunting in appreciation

“This contaminent was a threat unlike anything I've encountered before. A aggressive mental and technological paradigm that spreads like a virus, subverting technology and civilizations. If it had gained control over my 5th or 6th Order Technology...the consequences would be too horrible to think about.”

Dorothy nodded slowly. “So how did you beat it?”

Dorothy would later come to regret that innocuous question.

Her spouse had overcome so many threats in his span of existence, and she had grown so used to him pulling technological miracles out of his hat to save the day.

Richard closed his eyes. “I didn't. Some outside, unknown force intervened and caused my body to reject the contaniment. I recovered onboard the Skylark III, which had been...altered. Thankfully the ol Number 2 was unaffected. I took it out, and used the Attractors to dispose of the Skylark III in a black hole. Then I redevoused with the Valeron, and...well, here I am.”

His voice quavered a bit.

“I wanted to go back. But I had to make sure I was...was uncontaminated. It wouldn't have been safe otherwise. I tried to–“

Seaton rubbed his face, and slowly exhaled.

“Well, it's all done with.” He said with another fake smile, straightening his posture. “I suppose we should return to the Green System. I'll hide the Valeron again, you can show around your own ship–it looked marvelous from the outside!–and I'll be sure to catch up on lots of family activities. It'll be a vacation, and I won't even do any work! It's gonna be all good–“

“Richard.” Dorothy said in flat, jarring tone.

Richard fell silent.

Dorothy reached out and grasped his hand. With her other hand, she reached out and turned Richard's head to the right to meet her eyes.

And then she calmly ennuciated three words.

“Don't. You. Dare.” She said.

Richard blinked several times. “Red–”

“Don't you dare. Not with me.” Dorothy replied.

Two tears trickled down Richard Seaton's cheeks, and the metaphorical mask he had been wearing for the entire conversation finally dropped.

“I tried to fight back, Dottie.” Seaton rasped, clenching Dorothy's hand in his own. “I really, really did. But when I tried–“

He bowed his head and did what men of his fiber and determination only do under the most unique and rare of circumstances.

He wept. Without restraint or control or conscious thought.

“Shhhhh.” Dorothy said quietly, pulling him into a close embrace, clutching him like a wailing babe. “Shhhhh.”

“I tried...” Seaton mumbled as he buried his face in Dorothy's shoulder. “I tried...”

[Colesign]

And then the Part Where He Learns Violin (The Part after this is the one with the guest star)

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In the Orion Spiral Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, on the planet of Normalon in the arrangement of emerald suns and planets known as the Green System, within one of the gleaming spires of the proudest city of that ancient and revered race of scientists, Dorothy Vanemen Seaton drew a weathered bow across the strings of her pristinely and delicately kept Stradivarius Violin coaxing forth proud, resonant notes of unmitigated depth and emotional intensity! Slowly, and deliberately, her deft and strong fingers flew across the next, her bow moving in smooth flowing notions, so that the pitch and timbre and tone of each string was expressed to it's fullest and most rich extremes!

Finally, she let the last note softly fade away and lifted her bow from the strings with a sigh of pure, utmost satisfaction!!!

"Oh Well done, Mrs. Seaton! Well done!" A matronly looking Normalonian lady dressed with loose, billowing robes said, clapping her hands together in admiration, a box hovering in the air next to her, suspended on a precisely balanced rod of pure force!

"The melody was–well, how to say– quite subtle, simple and yet filled with such emotional depth!"

Dorothy eyed the Noramlonian with a sideways glance, then chuffed a single, wry chuckle. "Telamon...I was tuning."

Telamon's smiled faded. "Oh. I...feel rather foolish now, and believe you me, that's not something I feel quite often! It's a rather counterproductive emotion, I must say..." She cocked her head to the side.

"Your 'Violin': you must tune it every time before playing: yes, I see how the taut strings slowly loose elasticity, the means of correction is quite simple and elegant...still, wouldn't it be more efficient, to use strings made from strong materials? I could create an alloy as supple and resonant to your fingers as pure titanium alloy: never weakening, never slackening. Or perhaps a simple computer mechanism and automatically turns the pegs, keeping it constantly in tune: or the composition of the wood...some fiberglass materials..."

"Telamon..." Dorothy said, holding up her hand, bow clasped between her thumb and palm, smiling gently. "That's quite alright! I honestly wouldn't have it any other way. This violin's a piece of art, and I...I think tuning it manually is truly a better way of doing things!"

"I think I understand!" Telamon replied. "It's some quaint Earth tradition: artisan manufacturing, the old ways and and that...oh dear, that sounded rather patronizing: Oh, dear me!"

Dorothy laughed. "I think I can forgive you, 'Teleey'! It's not tradition...or at least, not tradition for the sake of tradition. It's..."

She paused. "I've played violin ever since I was eight years or age. Every day, I've been tuning it, using tuning forks at first, and then later fixing the tones right in my head and in my blood. Because of that...I know this instrument: I know the music I can make on it, how far I can push it...think Muscle memory, intuition, that sort of thing."

Telamon frowned, and nodded. "I think I understand: of course, there's a subjectivity to your viewpoint..."

Dorothy cut Telamon off as gently as she could. "Is it in the box?" She asked, nodding to the suspended box floating next to the First of Chemistry.

"Oh! Yes it is!" Telamon blinked, then picked up the box from it's cradle of energies and offered it to Dorothy. "A simple matter of molecular replication: the base components were rather elemental..."

"I understand." Dorothy hastily said. She set her Stradivarius in it's case gingerly, then took the box from Telamon and opened it.

"...Looks good. Perfect, in fact." Dorothy closed the box and set it to the side.

Then she hugged the First of Chemistry.

"Thank you." She whispered. "This'll...help."

Telamon's green skin darkened at the cheeks, and as she returned the embrace.

"Uh...well, it was no trouble at all." Telamon gently extricated herself, and toyed with a lock of his dark emerald hair, staring off into the distance.

"Has he really not left the observatory after all this time?"

"No," Dorothy said with a sigh. "He leaves to eat meals at the dormitories: he goes to one seminar at day, mostly cosmology related. He does some lab work during the Time of Work, and participates in one athletic activity during the Time of Relaxation. And then he goes back to the observatory, until the next day."

"Oh!" Telamon said, brightening a little. "Well, that's good, isn't it?"

"No." Dorothy said, picking up both cases and shaking her head softly. "No, it isn't"

%%%

Dorothy leapt up the inertia chute, wind rustling through her hair as beams of force levitated her up through the many floors of the observatory tower. She lightly stepped off at the top floor and approached the double doors to the Deep Space Probing room.

How do I want to do this? Dorothy thought, as she stopped How would Richard do this?

%%%

Richard Seaton, dolorously staring into the visiplate of the Normalonian Grand Deep-Space 5th Order Prober at a distant Nebula, was abrubtly jostled from his melancholy ruminations, when the door to the Observatory room was abruptly blown off his hinges by a Ray Gun Blast of Luminous, Ravening Destruction!

And through the smoke and fire, as Richard whipped out his Colt Automatic in anticipation of combat, strode his wife, Dorothy Vaneman Seaton, carrying her violin case in one hand, and brandishing a Infra-Ray blaster in the other, hair tousled and wildly strewn from the concussion of the energy beam!

Behind her, suspended on a delicate needle of force, floating wherever she roamed, was the mysterious box containing the object she had commissioned under mysterious circumstances!

With careless regard, Dorothy Seaton tossed the instrument of destruction to the side with a flick of her hand.

"Hello dear," She said dotingly with a smile. "How was your day at work?"

Richard lowered his guns back into their well-worn holsters, though he could banish his queer eyed expression quite so easily.

"Dorothy...what in blazes! I thought you were a vengeful Fenachrome or Skrull or Sontarran looking for payback...and the door! What about knocingk! It is in fact possible to knock on doors, as opposed to...you scared the living daylights out of me!"

Dorothy leaned her head to the side, and nodded. "There we are then: a passionate response, at last!"

Richard ran a hand through his air impulsively. "What...Dorothy, I'm fine. I've...dealt with it. I'm not being reclusive anymore."

Dorothy sighed. "No, now you're acting like an automated piece of machinery: for heaven's sake you're obeying schedules, of all things!"

She shrugged.

"I figured you needed something to knock you out of your planetary orbit of morose rumination, dear. I'm sorry if I startled you unduly."

Suddenly, she snapped her fingers and began walking forward.

"But you still need a bit of help, ****: and I think I know something that'll help."

With a well manicured and strong hand, Dorothy reached out and grasped Richard by the wrist.

"Dottie." Richard protested as his wife dragged him to the descending chute. "I'll feel better in time: please don't trouble yourself on my account...you've borne too much already..."

"That's all noble and self-sacrificing, Richard." Dorothy said, rolling her eyes and still dragging her husband along with her into the inertial chute, the mysterious box still floating along with her. "But this isn't about feeling better. Not really anyway.”

They stepped off into a conservatory area, a greenhouse style affair with fat-leaved, purple stemed Normalon vegetation, a small running indoor fountain whose water looped back and forth in fractal patterns, and a series of stone brick pathways leading to a small, well-lit platform.

There were two armless chairs. And in front of each chair was a simple metal music stand, with two thin books placed on each.

Seaton stopped in his tracks. "Oh?"

Dorothy reached over and flipped open the gently floating box. Nestled snuggly inside it, on top of a bed of a velvet-like substance, lay a complete molecular replica of Dorothy Vaneman Seaton's one-of-a-kind Stradivarius Violin, small in every way, even down to a few nicks and scratches.

"Dorothy?" Seaton said.

"It's yours." Dorothy said quietly, setting her case on the ground, picking up the violin from it's box with two hands, and offering it gingerly to her husband.

Richard hesitated, then reached out with one hand–

Dorothy gave him a cross-eyed look.

–Richard reached out with both hands and took it with both hands, cradling the Violin to his chest as awkwardly as he had with his newborn son.

"I thought I'd teach you how to play a bit." Dorothy said. "It's challenging, ever so rewarding..."

She smiled as a thought occurred.

"And it'll be just like Sherlock Holmes: all the great geniuses had a thing for music, right?"

"Dorothy..." Richard said with a heavy sigh. "At another time, this would be interesting, but..." He shook his head. "I don't think I'm in the mood for it."

Dorothy arched a thin, curving eyebrow. "Mood?" She asked dryly. "Music isn't like romantic wooing or a friendly barroom brawl: Music's too powerful a thing to be restricted for when you're in a Good Mood, ****."

She picked up her own case and took out her own violin. She set bow to string and began played a soft, slow tune of a few notes, pitched low enough that her voice could carry.

"You know so much about the nature of the universe and science, dear, but I know music. If the universe was a fire, it'd be the smoke. It surrounds and binds us and..."

She lowered her violin for a bit, pausing. "And the funny thing about it, is, everything is fodder for it. The happiest moment of your entire life..."

Her bow flew across the strings as she coaxed for a folksy tune of bright staccato notes.

"The most exciting..."

She increased the speed of her strokes, switching the tune to a swift bluegrass style song.

"Anger..."

Her bow scraped across the string, loud brassy notes vibrating forth as she played some bars from a song of Paganini.

"Sorrow..."

She slowed down, drawing out the notes into long, melancholy sounds of lament.

"It's all relevant. You can take the events of your life, all it's height and depths, and pour it all into your music."

She lowered her violin, gazing into Seaton's eyes.

"And it doesn't make your sadness go away. But if you pour your sorrow into your music, and coax beauty out of your suffering..."

Her eyes twinkled suddenly, and she held both her bow and violin in one hand as she rested her other on Richard's shoulder. Richard lifted one of his hands from where he held his new violin, and clasped it over his wife's.

"Well, then your sadness isn't so bad anymore, is it! It has worth, it has meaning, because it's been used to create something great and wonderful. And if you can use the lowest moments of your existence to create something good and beautiful...well, then that means it's all worthwhile, doesn't it? Life is worthwhile, always and ever."

She held eye contact with her husband, then averted her gaze and chuckled.

"Or at least...that's my cunning plan. So come on then. Fingering first, then learning how to draw the bow properly."

She beckoned. "Come on."

Richard hesitated. Then he let out a breath.

"All right." He started forward. "I should warn you I'm going to be really bad at this."

"This was anticipated." Dorothy replied as she sat down in front of one of the music stands. "Now then, posture and fingering: imagine there's a ball under your right hand, a ball of air..."

The business of tuning and posturing and techniques of fingering quickly passed, and Richard Seaton grasped them handily enough in the end. Finally, Richard lifted up the new bow and new violin, molecularly copied from the design of a long dead renowned earth craftsman, and set it to the freshly tuned strings.

The first note was very soft, almost too soft to be heard properly.

In the depths of space, a whirling fleet of cylindrical craft maneuvered into battle formation, their cold steel hulls numbering in the hundreds of thousands, some large, some small, but all alike.

Within the cold, gunmetal grey halls, metal men marched to and fro like ants in a hive, pistons clanking, faces of steel expressionless, all of them uniform and emotionless as the grey. In the fleet control room, their designated leader stood over a tactical display. One of the subordinates spoke in a buzzing electronic voice.

"Cyber Controller, unknown vessels approaching from subspace."

The Cyber Controller turned. "Display. Ascertain whether it is the enemy."

Far off from the Cyber Fleet, a flotilla of Cubes and Spheres appeared, uniform in shape and bereft of hull-plating.

A message was dispatched from each of the ships.

"We Are the Borg. Resistance is Futile. Lower Your Shields and Surrender Your Ship. Your Technology and innovations shall become our own."

A reply was dispatched.

"Your Order is Rejected. We are the next stage in bipedal evolution. We shall convert you to the superior Cyber-Paradigm. You will be like us."

"Incorrect. You shall be assimilated. Your paradigm shall be incorporated int our own."

"Incorrect. We shall enforce unity and uniformity. All who do not cooperate with upgrading shall be del–."

And then from several parsecs away, a single plunger was depressed.

And each and every Cyber Warship and Borg Cube were pierced through and through ravening particle beams of unfathomable intensity.

The very ether was flooded with jamming frequencies and electronic warfare blocks, overloading the sensory arrays of the various ships as they all crashed and burned as one.

No data was recovered, no adaptation possible. No survivors were left.

The hunt had begun. And as the civilized species of the galaxies fought their skirmishes with the Cybermen and the Borg, preparing their fleets in fear of an overwhelming invasion from the two...none of them knew of the many fleets that were being obliterated in the cold of space one by one, with no sign of who had caused it.


Richard tried again. This time it was louder, a shrill, warbling scraping sound. He winced.

Drifting between the void between galaxies, trawling the endless void of night, the Hive Mind listened to the songs of the planets, hearing the cries of the other biomass, clinging to their planets like moss on a rock, ready to be plucked and consumed and digested. Every single organism connected to the mind shivered in anticipation as the Tyranid Hive Fleet drew closer and closer to the beckoning star system.

And then they started dying: their front ranks exploding one by one as they ran head on into the dust cloud of pure antimatter, ripping through their baryonic flesh like acid, souring into death like lemmings...

Seaton tried a third time, drawing the bow close: the sound was a little shrill, but smooth. This time, he felt he was starting to get it.


A Projection of Seaton materialized within the secrets halls of the Knights of the Dark Tower, and he coughed politely as Taylor and Hellboy and the Wandering Puritan looked up from their deliberations on possible fractures in the temporal lock barring the Time War from the rest of Creation.

Seaton nodded. "I'm in."

He summoned a series of holographic images. "I have some concerns I want to put forth, and some proposals for a secret redoubt that I think you'll find interesting..."



On one of the two inhabitable planets in a rimward starsystem whose sun blazed a bright blue, there were a race of sentient telepathic birds of Paradise that called themselves the Riim.

And in the 20th Epoch of their peaceful, stable civilization, it was all falling to pieces.

Thirty percent of their youth were rioting, causing chaos, and overturning the conventional social paradigms, some of them even regressing to a bizzare form of ancestor worship. Buildings and some of the oldest arboreal habitats had been destroyed with home built explosives. On the danger-filled streets and branches, there were sightings of Otherly creatures, beasts not of either world.

But that wasn't the the worst of it. For among the affected, irrational youth, there was a core of them whose mind-gesalts were calling out as one, with one terrible will, sending forth a psychic beacon into the void far beyond the Oort Cloud of the system.

Probes had been dispatched under Inertialess acceleration, to see if there was something out there...

And in the brief moments before their destruction, they send back images of large ovoid things, sailing between the void in the multitudes, with crawling, writhing masses of monsters...all filled with hunger and hate.

And in the highest Great-Nest of the prime planet, the Great Elders of the Riim gathered, their plumages wilted and their beaks dull, transmitting a horde of contradictory telepathic gesalts, of Comfort, Fear, Plans and Counterplans, of Anger, Determination and Despair.

And then a large pink hairless monkey standing on two legs materialized in their midst.

He wore concealing clothes that called to the minds of the Riim coverings meant for harsh weather...or protection in battle. And he held a golden sphere in his two hands, covered with blinking lights in red, blue, and green colors, flashing back and forth.

And then, to the Surprise of all the Riim Elders, he–a monkey, at that–broadcast a telepathic Gesalt to each of the the bird people.

[Danger.] He broadcast. [Darkness. Hunger. Devouring of Worlds. Foe-Enemy. Beckoned Hence.

Tyranids.

Support. Aid.]

Stranger Monkey. The Riim Elders replied with varying levels of caution, distrust, and fear. Bad Messenger. Unknown. Danger to the Riim? No bond, no trust.

Reason. Urging. No Harm. Kin-Comrades. Think. Breath. Feel. Love. Progenate. Learn. Bond. Kin-Comrades. Mind.

Foe-Tyranids. Unopposed. Death of the Belly. Fight. Resist. Ward Off. Sacrifice. Indeterminate Victory. An Offering of Assistance. Knowledge. Weapons. Technology.

Hope.

No Trust Precedent. Reason Entreaty. Trust-Request Entreaty. Faith Entreaty.

Choice-Friendship?

For a moment, the waves of the Ether quieted as the Riim Elders confered amongst themselves, transmitting little packets of gesalts amongst themselves. Then as one, their head feathers twitched.

Choice-Friendship. Thinking Monkey Kin-Comrade. Mind.


Richard Seaton placed his prototype amplifier and inducer in his satchel, then rubbed his hands together with a bit of cheer.

"Right then." He cheerfully said to himself. "First things first: let's start by upgrading your sun..."

%%%

%%%

There's a subtle yet definitive gap between men of science and men of magic, and an even bigger gap between those whose feet have always trod upon the ground of a circular world compared that rare breed of men known as space travelers.

And nowhere is this gap more noticeable than when I sit here at this cracked table of stone, surrounded by my erstwhile comrades, all versed and skilled in the paranormal and as of yet unexplained forces known by the blanket term of 'Magic': men who can set fires with their minds, find any lost object in existence, unlock the pits of hell, and smite evil with the power of song, meeting in the world's oldest bar within a pocket dimension of terrible, marvelous, impossibilities. Here we sit, and make decision that will determine whether the Omniverse itself will continue to exist, or By Our Mistakes, Fall INTO OBLIVION!

And we speak, but we do not quite understand each other. They're all heroes: they're all brave, accomplished men: you cannot watch them and not realize it.

But we speak, and the words are understood, but the true subatomic essence behind them it lost somewhere between the air molecules. The young wizard gives me an earful for using the Kandolians as foot soldiers, for directing the energies of a civilization of violent, eager warriors towards a battle that will help protect the entire Omniverse...and then, in the same breath, he proposes manipulating a group of magic-suing british youths into becoming 'expendable' troops.

...Jeepers, how is that any better? Most seem to agree with my inner thoughts, but the gap remains. It's a gap dug out from the perception of different life experiences: champions of magic and faith, who have walked across a thousand planes of existence, hundreds of dark forests, dozens of nightmare lands, Wonderlands, and Olympuses. They look at me, an old government chemist who figured out how to build an interstellar spaceship, and they think my sphere of adventure to be duller, less awe-inspiring.

They know so little.

In some ways we might as well be mirror reflections of ourselves, the convex lense of magic verses the concave of science. My comrades are leaders of corporations, warrior brotherhoods, and have friends among the lands of spirits and elemental and the dark alleyways of the hidden occult civilizations. I'm the Overlord of a system of green stars, and have oath-sworn allies of both barbarian warriors and wise, elder scientist races.

But it's the big spat between Romantics and Enlightment aficionados all over again: these people on some level, I'd reckon, think that us scientific fellows suck the awe and wonder out of everything the more we try to figure things out.

The conversation at the table now turns to talk of sending an expedition into the Nevernever to learn the moods of Winter and Summer (A real sticker of a place–there are places where gunpowder doesn't combust. Heat Rays seem to work fine, thought).

I chime in with suggestions for armaments, and keep my flap shut about my trip to the Galactic Core just last week.

To see the things you see there would do you good for the rest of your life when it comes to being the life of the party.

%%%

Grand, bloated stars full of life and bustle, some literally being torn apart by tidal tension, great long streams of gleaming plasma still undergoing fusion making their merry ways across space. Planets of all shapes and sizes roaming their independent way, and still toasty warm from all the assorted light and charred to the bone. Grand mega-nebulas of rock, dust, and organic molecules, forming grand beautiful images in the infrared and ultraviolet as they orbit around star clusters, give birth to newborn suns, or go streaming inward with all the unlucky stars and planets and rubble into...

The core itself. Called Sagittarius A, or the Chandra, or the Grand Metric. The supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, holding it together, the sullen giant squatted amidst the wonder of our corner of the universe. Dark, brooding, and massive, so indescribably massive...and pumping out such much cosmic radiation and multiple orders of energy that you could grill all the eggs in the universe and still have room left over for all the steaks too.

That's the Galactic Core for you: you'd think it'd be too damned hostile and hot for life to thrive there.

But you'd be wrong. So wrong you'd be surprised. I've been wrong, time and time again, on my voyages through the universe in my beautiful 'Skylark'.

For everywhere I've gone, I've found life.

Plenty of hardy bacteria, of course. But that not's what you want to hear about, is it?

There are being made of raw quark plasma, flitting from star to star in strange energy barriers, refugees from the first ten seconds of the universe's creation, huddling together for warmth in a universe that to their perception has grown unimaginably large, cold, and dark.

There are life forms of radiant information that ride the all too frequent flares of stars at the galactic core, germinating in the wakes of radiation and deseminating their spores across the void of space in the grand bursts of red giants.

There are Space Monsters. Yes, Space Monsters. Great, terrible, and downright ugly beings that look like grotesque, overgrown hybrids of Parameciums and Diatoms and angular rocketships, beings of flagella and crystalline flesh, soaking in the energies in the upper layers of the sun to reproduce, emerging with grand ceremony and fanfare from their cosmic eggs.

As best as I can determine, they're actually a symbiotic species that evolved with the birth of the galaxy, and they practically act as it's immune system. More pertinently, they can manufacture antimatter and spit it at their foes: they slaughtered quite a few growing galactic civilizations before folks learned not to draw their attention.

And then there are the Black Crafts, dark angular darts that sprout long beautiful midnight wings like fractal butterflies, wings that can grow from the length of an asteroid to that of a planet, wings made of Bose-Einstein condensates that 'swim' through space and time.

They swarm about the black hole like moths to a flame...or, I feel, more like scientists around a shiny new toy. Installations composed of strands of cosmic strings and monopole layers stretch all the way around the Chandra like a web, or like the electrodes of my mechanical educators.

They're doing something with the Black Hole. What, I can't say. How could I?

But I can guess. A power source? Definitely: all the cosmic radiation in the Core is too flagrant to pass up. But energy can be found everywhere. Experiments? They've tended to this for too long to find the warped geometries of the Chandra a mystery like I do.

But it's a supermassive lump of matter compressed to it's greatest possible compaction...

...the ultimate circuit.

But I could be wrong.

Whatever the pilots of these black craft are, they are very, very old. So very old that their technology–no, the castoffs of their technology– has left it's traces in the machines and engines and devices of practically every civilization in this galaxy. Plasma blasters, hyperdrive, artificial gravity, deflector shields, repulsors, teleporters...they all bear the marks of one culture, of a civilization that came first when the stars were young, came up with some interesting toys, and then moved on to better things. To black craft with wings that can swim through space-time, say.

I've searched many parsecs, and heard a word from time to time.

Xeelee. Good enough for Aunt Ruth's apple pie, I suppose.

We abide each other, these Xeelee and I. You'd think that we'd be as far apart as an ant and an elephant, the two of us, but that's a load of baloney: I've taken paths quite different from these black butterflies, trod down paths of science they've not explored, and even the smallest of living things can set the largest of boulders rolling in this mad, wonderful, unpredictable universe of infinite fulcrums. We all have worth in the grand scheme of things. I have to believe that.

You could say...we are fascinated by each other. And I have something that they desire more than anything. Knowledge of other universes: of the great Bleed in between dimensions, of the Fourth Dimension alongside our own, of strange sea-horse creatures and extra angles, and the knowledge of my comrades, knowledges of the Lands of Faerie, the Plateau of Leng, and a great black tower at the center of a field of roses. The Xeelee are very concerned with alternate universes...obsessed, even.

I've been building a retreat here, a place where no one would dare to go, where the background radiation is too hazardous, and yet so plentiful as a source of energy. The Xeelee have elected to leave me be, they've done things to keep the Space Monsters off my scent, and they've given me a single word of their own.

The name of a planet. Arisia.

%%%

“...and this is where my story begins to have a point.” Seaton concludes, hands folded under a briefcase sitting in front of him on a table.

“I thought it already had a point.” Ramirez says, rolling his eyes. “Blah blah blah, science is awesome, blah blah, you guys don't appreciate me, blah dee blah, freaky space life forms, blah.”

Richard Seaton stared...then looked down and rubbed the back of his head. “Yeah...I laid it on a bit thick, didn't I?”

“A bit. “ Director Hellboy replied in his eternally gruff voice.

Richard shrugged helplessly, then leaned forward. “Look, fellows, in plain English: I talked with a few people, found a strange trans-dimensional planet full of some other people, and they pointed me to a planet of beings of pure intellect, that, marvel of marvels, actually like to help out less-advanced species. They can help us with our greatest need.”

He stretched his hands out. “To put it plain, we don't have to worry about armies: there's armies all over the place: we've got enough friends and allies to pull together some really large armies...without tricking a group of kids into becoming magical cannon fodder.” He adds.

“What we need...is people we can trust. Valiant men...and women, too, that are truly, deeply brave and pure of heart, with strength of mind, whose will never give up, and no matter how dangerous the situation, always go in. We need these people...and we need some kind of litmus test to prove their character to both us and to others, a test, and a symbol of their worth that can't be counterfeited or corrupted.”

“You can't measure trustworthiness with a machine, Seaton.” John Taylor replied. “I'm sure it'd make detective work a thousand time easier if you had a gizmo that could scan for bastards, but there's no such thing.”

Seaton grins. “Ah. But now there kind of is.”

He opens the case in front of him. Somewhat inevitably, the contents are glowing.

“The Planet Arisia and it's denizens like to travel up through the many dimensions over millions of years, departing each reality after they have completely visualized it's “Macro-Cosmic All”. The last universe they went to, they aided the forces of Civilization by giving them these to it's brightest and best. I talked with them about our situation, and they were willing to give us some samples.”

He pauses, then says. “So...who wishes to try these on first? They're safe: I tested it out first.”

He lifts up his wrist and rolls back his sleeve. And there, strapped to his arm in a bracer of platinum, is a glowing disc, gleaming with all the lights of the rainbow, like a prismatic jewel.

Or a Lens.

[Colesign]

The Part With the Guest Star...or is it?

Spoiler

Show

To truly master something, you must understand it completely down to the fundamental quanta of it's composition, to it's most basic essence.

And at the core of practically everything, especially the art of combat, is the transfer of energy in all it's forms, in varying degrees of form and elegance. Quantity of energy and the complexity of it's application: these determine the results of any endeavor.

And so much energy comes from life. And it is our responsibility to see that energy employed for good things, to add something to the universe, rather than destroying it.

The Overlord lectures quite frequently on energy and it's manifestations throughout the 6 Orders of Radiation: it all sounds rather pretentious the way he goes on about it.

But someone else taught me about the power of life, someone important. So very important.

Damned if I can remember. But then, I'll be damned regardless.

Because the Overlord took my memories. And rest assured that pisses me off.

%%%

“Bwha!” said the Overlord as I punched him in the nose. Not the jaw...someone taught me to always go for the soft parts of the human body.

Someone that I can't see with my minds eye, or recall the voice of, or anything...except smells, sometimes. The memory of the smells of leather, cheap food, coffee, copper, fire, and sulfur.

Which, what, means that he was a chimney sweep or something? Probably not.

Goddamn, I hate amnesia.

Meanwhile, face punching.

The Overlord staggered back and fell over, stupid Hawaiian shirt, bomber jacket, and extra stupid sash of jangling badges clattering all about as he hit the hard floor.

“Right.” The bastard said after a moment, wiping the blood from his face with the back of his hand, and attempting to stand back up. “I can understand your feelings.”

I responded to his understanding by attempting to kick him in the face.

He rolled out of the way almost instantly and stood up, picking himself up with a casual, catlike ease of movement, and dusted himself off, adjusting the brass-tinted circlet he wears on his head every-time he's in the same room as me.

“Yow-wee!” He said, raising his eyebrows. “I didn't know you were such a feisty wildcat, Missy!”

“Shut up, you bastard, and give me my memories back!” I snarled, rushing forward.

%%%

I should backtrack a bit.

I woke 5 days ago, and my first memory was of a pale-green skinned man with a wispy Fu-Manchu beard and a slightly bulging cranium bending over me, the folds of his robe resting on my arm, a benevolent smile on his face.

“Good morning!” He chirped. “I am Phernol, the First of Neurology! Tell me, Subject No. 4: are you feeling any side effects from the mind operation? A persistent taste of tropical fruits, perhaps?”

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!” I replied.

We sorted things out over time.

“Where am I?” I wound up asking, after I calmed down.

“My dear, you are currently within the Green System, on none other than the planet Normalon!” Phernol proclaimed.

My mouth dropped open, and I gaped.

“That means absolutely nothing.” I clarified.

I leapt out of the bed and tossed the metallic blankets aside.

Phernal blinked and held up his hands. “Wait, wait! Your neural RNA infusions need time to settle–!”

I shoved past him and ran towards the nearest balcony. If I could get my bearings, jumping down, get out of there–

I skidded to a stop, flailing about my arms like windmills: and a good thing too. Apparently safety railing are the grandest, most unique, and most exclusive invention of humankind.
We were also on the top of a really, really high tower, a single spire of gleaming, green-gold metal, strange flying pods flitting around to and fro beneath, and a long–repeat, long– drop down to the dirt below.

The wind...was gentle, even as high up as it was. Fortunately for my dignity, considering that I was only clad in an alien version of a hospital gown.

I looked down and outward and up. At the large distance down, the purplish mountains in the distance...a daylight sky of azure, with several green suns tracking their way across the heavens from horizon to horizon.

“Not too shabby.” I finally managed to blurt out.

%%%

All the other 'Normalonians', all dressed in long silk-metallic robes, were gentle, smart, and friendly to me, showing me about the facility, pointing out details with a mild pride, before retiring 'en masse' when a soft alarm chimed from loudspeakers positioned all over, for 'Recreation'. It...was a little creepy. Stepford Wives creepy...or, I suppose, Stepford Aliens. Stepford Alien Mad Scientists.

Because that's what they basically were. The largest college town in the universe, filled with tall, thin, green, slightly absent-minded professors. A civilization so refined and tweaked and old that practically every facet of life had become regulated by custom and tradition. Recreation, exercise, career, work, youth, maturity, and retirement.

God I went stir-crazy. And their music was rubbish.

I wound up going to their Country of Youth as soon as I was able, spending time with the children of their planet, children, who, unlike all those sickeningly vanilla adult aliens, actually had a bit of passion and restlessness, and, you know, emotions that were anything but 'mild'.

It was a beautiful alien place with swimming pools of ammonia, forests with inside out flowers, and thousands of young teenagers hopped up on some alien form of caffeine that they must produce internally with, I dunno, some alien gland, frolicking and debating and arguing in a vibrant way that their stodgy old parents couldn't seem to manage.

And it was, I decided attending one of their 'parties', the most cleverly disguised cram school in existence. They worked themselves into quite the frenzies solving mathematics, psychology, biology, neurology, physics, astrophysics, metaphysics, and all the other 'sics and 'logys out there.

But in those first days, it wasn't all the technobabble that was scary.

It was the fact that sometimes, when one of them got on about the modulating of frequencies produced by a ring cyclotronic array within a Rovolon-Catalytic atomic power plant, I'd suddenly remember that the proper frequencies for uranium excitation are in the delta and epsilon wave patterns, and before I knew it, my mouth was blurting out the answers like bird song.

It's enough to make you feel cross-eyed. Or on a really bad Star Trek ripoff.

Spaceships, rays, recorders, thought transfers, attractor-repeller dynamics, basic circuitry, orbital mechanics, flywheels, passive-actives...whoever my past self was, she knew things about science. Science in Space. And though I can't remember a single inch of my mother's face, all that knowledge and jargon just pops up If I look for it.

Those first few days with Stepford Aliens, mad scientist aliens and pools full of ammonia were weird. And yet oddly enough, they felt...peaceful. Very peaceful...almost like I hadn't had a good peaceful day in a long, long while.

That was–that is a clue.

Occasionally, I'd catch a glimpse of myself in burnished metal and pools of liquid gleaming in the light of several green suns. Good looking...a healthy sort of good looking. Light-colored hair: the green light from the suns made it difficult to tell what my actual hair color was early on. An adult, though I was technically only 5 days old in my mind.

And lastly, there's a mark on my right palm, a faint scar. Partially faded, but still bearing what looks like a curved, twisted, yet ornate version of the the number '4', warped into a hourglass or infinity symbol or sorts.

Not much as far as clues go. What was I before...well, before? A knight of infinity, or a lady of time? A space pilot? A space pilot that was married to a chimmney sweep? A space pilot that ran a army of intergalactic chimney sweep mobsters?

Your guess is as good as mine.

And then a rumor started spreading about, whispers, bits of scientific gossip gleaned from data from nearby observatories.

The Overlord was coming to town.

By the way, he claims that I was the sinister Psychic Empress of an evil world conquering empire.

But I'm getting ahead of up myself

%%%

“The Overlord?” I asked.

“The Overlord!” My big-brained acquaintances replied.

And then we all broke into a song and dance number.

Only joking: this is what actually happened.

“Who the heck is 'The Overlord?” I asked, making quote gestures in the air. “And does he have a list, by any chance?”

“What–no, no, I don't think so.” Pheldax replied, frowning as he listened to my question.

Pheldax was a kid I was hanging out with, the heir to a scientist who studied sound, who wanted to rediscover the principles of emotional music composition, the ability to write passionate music having been lost after the Third Paradigm Reformation.

He was sort of the alien mad scientist equivalent of a Bohemian, I suppose. Made him more willing to spill the beans on certain issues.

“He's the highest authority in all of the Green System”. He continued. “I believe the earth term is 'Dictator'. Yes, the root word 'Dictate', to denote the giving out of commands.”

“A Dictator.” I replied in what you might consider a flat tone of voice.

“Yes!” Pheldax replied. “A dictator of Peace and Love, that destroys our enemies!”

I decided not to challenge the man's idea of what peace and love signified.

“And what, you can't do that yourself?” I drawled.

“Yes!” Pheldax replied brightly without hesitating.

I stared at him for a moment.

“You seem confused.” Pheldax replied. “After millions of years of natural selection for living in a stable civilization, no Normalonian now living has the instincts or the temperament to take another's life! The most we could offer is passive resistance, and the alarming quantity of truly depraved races out among the galaxy, with minds so malformed as to eagerly seek out galactic conquest and extermination, renders such an approach...limited.”

“So basically...This Overlord of yours...you need him because he actually has the balls to fight.”

Pheldax frowned. “I do not understand the metaphor of 'balls' (it could refer to sporting implements, a reference to common spaceship schema, celestial bodies...), but as a human like you, the Overlord possesses both the fierce survival instincts of the barbarian races, and the reasoning capacities of the older, civilized races. Quite remarkable really.”

And staring at this cheerful teenager alien bohemian super-genius, I suddenly felt really angry. It was like a soft voice was whispering at the back of my head filling my thoughts with a quiet horror at their...

“So that's how it is.” I said quietly to myself.

Pheldax turned and frowned at me, a pair of cold drinks wafting their way across the arcology green on beams of force or some nonsense (There were–and are–beams for everything on this planet. Beams for communicating, beams for building things, beams for bringing and taking away food, beams for flying, beams for–there's just too many beams, rays, streamers, tubes, and goddamn multicolored rainbow thingies for my taste. It's like a Skittles commercial out here.)

“How's what?” He asked, taking a drink in his hand.

“How's you!” I barked out. “You can't even blacken a person's eye to save the world and all your loved ones, but you can just hire a guy to use your weapons and fly your ships, then kick back on your chairs and sip alien lemonade while he goes off and slaughter millions, is that right?”

Pheldax flinched back. “It's not in our nature to kill...”

“Oh, sure: you're all lightness and cuteness and sunshine and puppies–puppies with tentacles and fiddly bits, I suppose–“ I drawled, rolling my eyes. “But guess what: it's completely in your nature to kill. Don't tell me you were somehow tricked into making your death rays and bombs and giant spaceships and handing them out to fruity 'barbarian' space pilots. You chose to let your 'Overlord' do your killing for you, and guess what? That makes you killers!”

Pheldax blinked rapidly and held up is hands. “You disapprove of killing? You, who have...no, no I mustn’t say.”

I felt fierce, fierce curiosity. He knew things about me that I didn't. I wanted to grap him by the scruff of his neck and shakes some answers out of him like a good ol' barbarian.

“I disapprove of cowards who lie to themselves, who can't do whatever it takes to protect the ones they care about!” I shouted, my hands clenched into fists. “I know you have it in yourself to take another's life, so what, you're too 'evolved' to get your hands dirty? Can't kill if it's not neat and clean and at a distance?”

“You're making us out to villains of some kind!” Pheldax finally blurted out. “That's not true at all: we aren't conquerers enforcing our power upon the universe! We help to defend it , to preserve it's depth and beauty! Yet there are so many....”

Pheldax paused in his conversation, and looked up at the sky. I followed his gaze, and saw a bright streak tearing it's way across the sky, some large object ripping it's way through the atmosphere.

“Oh dear! His descent angle is a bit reckless today!” Pheldax replied, scratching the back of his rather large cranium.

“Hmmmph...your “Overlord”, I presume.” I replied, unclenching all the tensed muscles in my body and letting out a breath.

“Indeed.” Pheldax confirmed. “If you truly wish to have answers to your questions, he can provide you with the truth.”

I snorted. “Fat chance. I'll probably just get more vague platitudes and cryptic clues.”

%%%

Eventually a gleaming mile-long spire that looked like it was made of light-purple glass, crawling with weapon ports, touched down upon a landing cradle nearby, as soft as a feather upon sunlight grass.

A series of concentric, multilayered hatches slid open, and a human wafted it's way down in midair: gracefully, like superman.

He looked like a weird hyrbrid of a dashing World War 1.5 fighter pilot with his jacket and scarf, and half like a equally dashing grease monkey, with a belt full of dangling tools. There was a sash across his chest and a wrist bracelet, covered with badges of some sort

He had a Hawaiian shirt on. A horribly, horribly bright and colorful Hawaiian shirt.

I had to blink at that.

As his feet touched the ground, his eyes looked up and met mine. Grey eyes. (Why were grey eyes ringing alarm bells in my head?) They seemed to have a mesmeric quality, pulling me in...no, it was like I was falling down from a great height, a tugging as natural as gravity.

Then we both looked away at the same time.

“So,” I said, looking at the guy's nose. “Who the hell are you?”

“ Richard Seaton, Doctorate of Chemistry, District of Columbia, United States of America, Co-Owner of Seaton-Crane Engineering, Ma'am.” He replied quietly.

“And what's it to me?”

Mr. Seaton thought about it.

“Well, I'm the man who had all your memories wiped from your mind!” The man replied with a friendly smile, waving briefly. “Hi!”

“Bwha!” He swiftly added.

%%%

“Can't!” Richard replied, holding up his hands.

I paused. “Can't?” I asked very quietly.

Richard cocked his head to the side. “Well, won't, actually–OOopph!”

That was my fist colliding with his stomach.

“They. Aren't. Yours!” I shouted, and clenched two fists together into a mallet. “So Give. Them. Back!”

And then I brought down the hammer. The justice hammer...of my fists, or something of that nature.

Seaton reached and caught with his own hands. Our muscles strained.

And apparently this 'Overlord' took time off from blowing up alien battle fleets to do some 'Lumberjacking'.

He threw me back, and my body slammed against a wall.

Seaton stood up.

“Right then.” He said to himself, and pulled out a gun from his jacket.

He pointed the barrel right at me, and squeezed the trigger.

I froze.

Dammit, dammit, what do I do? I won't die here!

Then, suddenly, Seaton froze and lowered his gun slightly, blinking. He looked around the room with his eyes, as if checking to make sure that no one was eavedropping. Then he said.

“Interesting...Ma'am, I'd like to ask you a question. From your perspective, do I feel like someone who wants to kill you?”

“Say the man with a gun in my face!” I growled.

“Don't use you mind, don't try to reason it out.” Seaton said, raising the gun again “Believe me, telling someone not to use rational thinking is...well, it goes against the grain for me. But use your instincts. Focus on what you can feel. Let your mind listen. And then tell me if I want to kill you at the moment.”

“And what...that determines whether I live or die?”

“Not really. I'm just curious.” Seaton replied.

“Dick.”

“Only my friends call me that....oh.”

I closed my eyes and did what the damned Overlord flick jock fellow wanted me to. I 'stretched out with my feelings' like a goddamned Jedi.

And it felt like a familiar exercise, my mind falling into focus...and then I realized that my mind had been 'stretching' for a while, feeling emotions and forces and flows of energy around me. The planet was just such a neat and tidy little hovel of a place, down to the mindsets of the citizens, that strong emotions hadn't registered yet.

And Mr. Good Ol' country boy Overlord was a very angry man. Not frothing at the bit...but a low,simmering keep the tea kettle on rage...at, I guess, everything he didn't like about the universe.

Some of that anger was focused at me. Subconsciously, I suppose I'd picked up on that.

Made sense. I was really wailing on him back there...mainly for the whole 'take my goddamned memories bit'.

Anyways, there was a question to be answered.

“You would kill me if you needed to.” I said. “But right now you don't plan to.”

Seaton grinned slightly, and lowered his gun.

“So your talents survived the mental surgery.” He replied, holstering his piece.

“Blegh.” I said, shivering.

“What?” Seaton said, raising his eyebrows.

“Don't say it like that!” I said. “'Surgery' makes me think of lobotomies, electroshock and scalpels and all that creep ass stuff that only is used in twisted evil madhouses with creepy nurses and Jack Nicholson!”

“...Okay. I forgot you 21st century types are leery of mental asylums for some reason.” Seaton said with a frown, and walked out the room...and onto a set of floating platforms suspended by beams of energy.

I paused.

That Cannot Be Safe...the hell with it.

I jogged and caught up with him.

“If it's any comfort, you're still very much...you, temperament wise.” He said finally, little super-science stepping stone things jumping up in front of him as he walked...a large tower covered with dishes and antennas loomed ahead of us, and beneath us there was a lake and garden with vines of some kind. “I'm simply had the experiences which twisted your mind into developing criminal impulses removed from your consciousness.”

“Which apparently included my '4th Birthday Party, of all things! Cut the crap: this is a **** Move you've pulled on me.”

“Yes, it is very much something I'd 'pull' on...oh.”

Seaton sighed, then turned to face me.

“But you want answers. So ask away.”

I folded my arms across my chest. “Who was I to you?”

“A Nemesis.”

“What, one of the soldiers of one of the star nations you destroy for acting out?”

“Actually, you were the the Evil tyrant of a power-mad empire.”

I blinked.

“You're ****ting me.”

“No tall tales.” Seaton replied. “Honest to Good empress. You had a crown, and a fancy dress and throne and everything.”

He adjust the roman-style circlet resting on his head uncomfortably.

“And an army of doom fueled by unholy technology.” He added.

“Really.” I said flatly. “You're not just high on grass...or no, wait, you're an astronaut...high on Astroturf.”

“Really!” Richard Seaton replied, frowning as if hurt by my allegations that he could be hiding the truth somehow. Then his features turned dark.

“Believe me when I say that our battle ranged from the atmosphere of Earth to the farthest reaches of space. There was great clashes of force, victories, defeats, betrayals...and then you reached out for a power that you had no right to use...and it destroyed your mind.”

“So yes. Yes. I took away your memories to remove the evil tyrant from the picture. And I took away your memories to restore your sanity: to bring back a remarkable mind from the brink of trauma and corruption...and give you a chance to redeem yourself for your crimes.”

“That's high and mighty of you, isn't it? Take away everything I was, and then condemn me for bad things I can't remember doing! Actually, screw it: no 'high and mighty' about it: it's wrong, what you've done!”

“No!” Richard barked, glaring at me. “It was right!”

We fumed at each other for a bit.

Then he sighed and rubbed his head.

“I'm sorry: I've been way too rude as of late: one should never say harsh words to a dame such as you. But here's what's what: I don't do 'wrong', Miss. I always do the right thing.”

“Bzzzt! Bzzzt! Warning! Ego overload imminent!” I pantomimed, waving my hands about. “I mean, seriously, ever read any greek tragedies? They talk about a certain little thing called 'Hubris'.”

“I'm not proud, Miss. I assure you, I've absorbed too much knowledge of a psychological science perfected over thousands of years of contemplation and experimentation to fall victim to such base mental defects. All the knowledge I've absorbed...it's taught me how to really think. How to figure out what's right and wrong.

And I always do right, ma'am.. Even when it requires tough calls.”

Seaton's eyes bored into mine for a moment, with a hypnotic degree of intensity...before he quickly averted him again.

And there was that anger again, this time emanating from his gaze.

And I wondered how much anger it would take to make even the brainiest of individuals go nuts.

Heck, we were already on the planet of Mad Scientists.

“I still want them back.” I replied.

“Do you like the thought of being an evil power-mad empress?” Seaton replied.

I paused. “Did I have a harem of hunks with choices in hair color?”

A funny thing happened then.

Mr. Big 'Ol grim Manly Man Wrench wielding Hero of Science Richard Seaton...blushed.

An outright, bright-red blush. Then he looked down, rubbing the back of his head.

“I...well...That is to say...I should...no, I don't think so...although...”

Stammering. Actually, tongue-tied staring.

It actually a bit cute. Looked like the fellow was a good old country boy after all. Although weren't the 1920s supposed to be a cosmopolitan era?

“Joking.” I finally said.

“Oh!” Seaton replied, scratching the back of his left ankle with his right foot as he stared at the floor: finally, he lowered his hand and looked up at me with a raised eyebrow. “Perhaps I didn't quite appreciate it while blowing up your capital, but you're a hell of a dame.”

“Noted. And yes, I still want my memories back. I don't care if they're tainted with the ripe, scented bodywash of evil. They're mine. They're part of who I am.”

I stood up on my tippy-toes and regarded Seaton with narrowed eyes.

“So do you give them back, or do I have to kick your ass with my psychic powers?”

Seaton paused. “Technically, they're not quite psychic.”

“Tomay-toh, Tomah-To.”

“Right, right.”

He folded his arms across his chest.

“Let's make a deal.”

%%%

So here's the deal we wrangled out.

I fight 75 battles for Seaton. Not wars, or conflicts. Just battles. Battles against the cruelest of his enemies, the rotten bastards that in his words 'no sane person would not want to not stop'.

I do 5 good deeds of my own choosing, any time, any place, any circumstance, free of any supervision (what keeps me from lying about say, helping five ladies across the street, I asked? Oh, I'll just trust you, he replies.)

And then I'm 'Redeemed' in Seaton's eyes, whatever that means. And he'll give my memories back, hoping that the good karma I've accumulated will stop me from instantly turning evil once I remember who I truly am.

I'm pretty sure he isn't lying: I can 'sense' that his feeling aren't deceptive. I've tested my 'powers' over the past few months, to see what I can do: so far, I can sense feelings, feel flows of energy, anticipate things...if I focus, I can even 'cloud men's minds' and slip past them unremarked.

Doesn't prove that he's not deluded. Or that he won't do the right thing and 'kill' me if I become too edgy and grimdark after regaining my identity.

So yes: apparently I'm a Jedi of some kind. A Jedi that went to the Dark Side, if what the Overlord says is true.

And when I stretch out with my feelings, the Force tells me that Doctor Richard Seaton is hiding something from me, and that underneath all the noble speeches, he's willing to manipulate me something fierce.

So for now, I keep doing the job, keep my wits about me, do some investigating on the down low, and if I happen to find a data crystal or cassette tape marked 'Number Four's Memories', then it'll be time to snatch, grab, and bid the Science Hero Overlord 'Sayonara'.

One way or another, I will reclaim the face of the man whose I can remember only by smells, or my name isn't...

...isn't...

...well damn.

%%%

Which brings me up to date, as I stand at the helm of the custom spaceship they made for me, listening to the transmitted ultimatum from the chief General of the Galactic Empire of Mr. Potatoheads.

God, I wish I was kidding.

“A human?” One of the potato-headed clone soldiers on the viewscreen barked in a gruff voice of a drill sergeant and crotchety old man combined, fists slamming down on on something out of view. “The fabled Green System would send against the combined might of the Ever Victorious 5th Sontarran Battle Fleet...A SINGLE FEMALE HUMAN WITH STATISTICALLY LOWER UPPER ARM STRENGTH?!?!”

“Hiiiiii.” I said, wiggling my fingers.

“You Mock Us! You Mock the Honor of Sontarr with Your Mockery! Do Not Think We Will Let This Pass! I, Admiral Grask, the Untarnished, Swear Upon the Sequence of My Clone Batch That I Shall Obliterate You Down To The Last Molecular Strand! For the Glory!! Of the Sontarran Emp–!!!”

I blew a raspberry. And Mr. Potatohead's face turned orange. It was actually sweet.

You know...sweet, as in sweet potato...never mind.

“Impudence is the weapon of weaklings!!!!”

“Right, right.” I muttered, crossing my arms. “Let's just skip to the ultimatum: this system isn't yours, conquering it is a **** move, and if you try, I'll kick your genetically duplicated asses five ways to Sunday in a barrel...whatever that's supposed to mean.”

“Sontarrans hold No Fear of Death! We Stare Into the Face of OBLIVION Without–“

I tapped a button and flicked the screen off.

I leaned back and ran a hand through my hair.

Then I cracked my knuckles.

“Computer: Tactical Display.”

A hologram flickered to life, showing the a spherical chunk of space. Bascially my ship, an AU or so away from a large assortment of spherical/pointy Sontarran Dreadnaughts: blinking points of light indicated the deployment of a fighter screen...a very, very large fighter screen.

Imagery of lots of persians and their fabled sun-blotting collection of arrows flashed through my head.

“Ain't no shade in space.” I growled. “Computer: deploy Psycho-Frame Interface.”

My chair slid back on gimbals and lifted up a bit: a cage of gleaming, subtly shifting metal lowered itself down from the ceiling and surrounded me, cables hooking themselves into wall ports with solid sounding 'clicks'. A headset settled in around the back of my head and ears

I closed my eyes and focused. “Link established. Password.”

I breathed out a single word. A word of power, if you will. Not going to tell you what it is: who knows who might be reading this.

And then I felt the connection take hold, felt my mind bond with the amplifiers built into the very structure of the ship.

I opened my eyes to see several panels jut out of hatches on gear-driven gimbal arm thingies, offering me brass-rimmed controls, levers, and buttons that looked like they came out of the lab of Dr. Frankenstein.

“Right, then.” I growled, grasping two plunger-style switches. “Lets be about this.”

%%%

“Alright, Mr. Overlord fellow.” I finally said, hugging myself as I stared off at a horizon filled with multiple setting suns. “You've got a deal. Actually wait... I have one other demand before the spit and shake.”

“What?”

“A bottle of hair-dye. Several, in fact.”

“...Several?”

%%%

I took my ship, Skylark Antiamor, into battle at full thrust, diving right into the thick heart of the Sontarran Battle Fleet.

It's spherical, and as nimble and light as a soccer ball, with a transparent hull studded with a ridiculously large amount of weapons. It's vertical circumfrence is studded with a large amount of protrusions and spike-like devices, giving it the look of an rayed sun. I reached out through the interface and insinuated my mind into my standoff weapons.

“Launch Robotic Dirigible Force!”

Hundreds of unmanned cigar-shaped ships detached themselves, and zoomed off in twinkles of light, flitting to and fro.

I reach out with my mind and told them to raise a ruckus, but to be home before curfew.

They dove into the Sontarran formations, spraying ships all about with CR-class particle weapons and gamma bursts...when they weren't busy ramming ships with drill heads.

I took the Antiamor right down the throat of the main flagship, and depressed a plunger.

A really large beam licked out and scraped the hull of one of the ships.

Boom.

Then the rest of the fleet targeted me. The ray shields started radiating away the energy projected at me, glowing red, then orange, working their way up the spectrum.

“Heh.” I remarked, grabbing at some joysticks that wouldn't have looked out of place on a Sopwith Camel. “Ain't gonna give you the chance to scratch me.”

I closed my eyes and reached out through the interface, brushing against the many sensations in space: all the enemies fighting us, the drones still lashing out at my enemies as I told them, the strange flows of energy emanating from the nearby star....

I reached out with the Force, the psyframe amplifying my will, projecting it outward.

And to the eyes of the sorry bastards facing me, my ship started multiplying, dozens and dozens of versions each leaping into action and doing their own thing.

One began moving at near impossible speeds, it's image blurring into a strange rainbow effect that caused the eyes to hurt.

Another began launching a ridiculous number of missiles that spiraled and twisted in beautiful, patterns.

One simply lit off it's engines and dove forward, seeking to ram into the nearest enemy ship.

Another was hit by a ship-killer beam, broke in half, and exploded.

...except none of them were real. Illusions, bendings of the mind, holograms, call 'em what you will...

Damn Sontarrans wound up hitting nothing but air. Vacuum, pardon.

“Charge Starbreakers. Fire on mark.”

[Colesign]

So...How has everyone been?

[AnimeKid]

I've been good. I'm feeling a little left out with all the stories going on with peoples characters. However I'm horribly lazy so if I did write a story including Fayt, KOS-MOS, or any of my other characters it would take several weeks to 2 months. Oh well.

[Cracklord]

Colesign! How are you doing? Cool spaceship, extra head suits you.
I'm doing pretty well. Can't complain.

[Colesign]

Extra...head?

Good to hear you're doing fine, Cracklord.

And huh. I just realized how many typos there are in my stories. I'll have to freshen them up a bit.

[Cracklord]

Douglas Adams reference, Colesign. Don't worry, you'll get it.

And I still like your stories.

[Colesign]

...Oh dear god. Don't tell me I just won the award for Worst Dressed Sentient Being in the Universe...

Thanks, and right back at you.

[Cracklord]

Colesign's just this guy, you know?

[Colesign]

Yep.

That's me. Best Bang since the Big One

Say, have any of you seen this? Neat series that touches on a lot of the pop culture in this RP

[Cracklord]

Who are the Jacks of all Trades? They're the librarians secret police, enforcers, spies and all that. They're almost undetectable, except by their names (They all have the first name Jack), and hide, melding seamlessly into society until the time has come to strike. They can sniff their enemies out, they have skills at necromancy and certain other magics, as well as a whole range of individual skills. Also, in the physical world...
Well think of them as agents from the Matrix, able to hack into the rules and make them not apply to them. However, in the various subworlds they can't do that. They work for the librarians, though they're not actually affiliated, and have done so since the days of Kevin Thorne, every man jack of them.
However, with the Alcatraz family, it's personal. Long time ago, one of their people – that was back in Egypt, in pyramid days – foresaw that one day, there would be a Smedry child born who would walk where he was not welcome. If this child grows to adulthood it would mean the end of our order and all that they stand for…
There's my attempt at librarian mythology. How is it?

And in this world, this world with a lack of many superheroes, it hit me that this Batman is partly 'Batman Holy Terror', and mostly 'Dark Knight returns'. It probably won't become relevant, but keep that in mind.
That's also why, in this world, Tim Drake is the only Robin we've seen.