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The Pendragons Issue #110	Brought together in defense of Avalon and the British Isles, the Pendragons are the officially-sanctioned heroes of Great Britain. Originally led by the Black Knight, the group is composed of the remnants of the old Knights of Pendragon group, as well as several other heroes. Willing to die for their beliefs, the Pendragons stand united as England's best defense against threats of a superhuman nature. Pendragons logo created by David Wheatley based on designs by Des Davies and Kell Carpenter!
Written by David Wheatley

“Fascinating,” said Sinister, examining the object in his hand, protected by a static field preventing exposure to any contaminants in the open air. He looked at it from several angles, admiring it, exploring it with clinical observation. “From this… thing of wonder I am touching the essence of the Pendragon spirit, the heir of Arthur.” The mystical energy which he could see and had determined as the essence of the Pendragon was denied him. “So why can I not recreate it?”

Ever since Clive Winthrop had escaped from Cardiff to Wundagore, taking Jessica Drew with him, he had been working to try and determine the mystery that was the spiritual essence of the Pendragons, learning why Jessica was the heir of Arthur. Her genetic lineage was not what he had expected, not even a match for that of Adam Crown, though if he went back far enough, he knew he would find some commonality. He had explored their genetic lineage back to the time of the Celts and found nothing, he had looked at DNA and come up empty and now he was quite literally taking matters in to his own hands. He placed the object in to a holding field and turned his attention to another object of almost identical appearance and he handled it with the same care he had given to the first object, knowing both were precious and vital to his investigation.

“I know of science, I know of magic, yet this,” he mused, “this that I have cloned to the minutest detail, this does not have the one thing I have tried to replicate. I must confess, dear ladies, that this is something that does indeed puzzle and perplex. I am Sinister and yet I can feel him mocking me.” He looked up to the heavens. “You may laugh now, Essex, but the last laugh shall be mine!” He brought both objects together. “There is no discernible difference between them in the slightest. They have the same structure, same genetic patterns, the same blood flowing through them.” He sighed, knowing the secrets held within were still beyond him, at least for the moment and then he made a decision. “Let us see what happens when we swap them over.” He looked at them and smiled. “What do you say?” Jessica and Miriam could say nothing, their mouths covered with a slim metal band, but if they could make a sound, the room would have been filled with their mutual screaming. “I’m glad you agree,” Winthrop chuckled. “It’s all in the name of science.” He gathered his tools and looked to Jessica. “You’re first.”

He gathered the heart he had removed from Miriam and approached the exposed cavity in Jessica’s chest. “Aren’t you glad you and your sister had this little… heart to heart?” Then he began his surgery to replace the heart he had taken from her. One way or another he was going to find the secrets of the Pendragons, even if he had to take her apart one cell at a time…

“Experiment 27. Conclusion,” Sinister said, his words recording as he spoke. “I have examined in depth the hearts of both Drew and her clone, yet have been unable to clarify where the Pendragon energies come from. Swapping the hearts of the women has had no effect – the organ within Miriam has retained the mystical powers that I sensed when examining it, but Miriam herself has not been flooded with Pendragon energies. As always, this is not looking at a conduit for the power of the Green, but for a way of recreating the heir of Arthur. Jessica was chosen for this, the potential being within her. It is this potential I wish to create, and I have to determine what the source of the potential is.”

He paused and wearily put his hand on his forehead, considering his options. He had put Jessica through various procedures and examinations, and he had found that there had been similar experiments done on her before, though nothing as in-depth as what he was doing to her.

“Miriam lacks the potential of Jessica Drew for reasons I cannot fathom and I do not know why. Apart from this Pendragon energy that I have determined is what marks her as the heir of Arthur, I have made Miriam exactly in her image…” He paused. “No,” he said. “Not exactly in her image. The face is different, there are cosmetic differences to ensure they were not seen as the same woman.” It should not make any difference, and as a scientist he knew that, but knowing of magic he knew that appearances were as important as anything else. “Have I been so foolish?” He needed to clone Jessica again, and retain everything exactly as it should be. It also meant Miriam was surplus to requirements. “I must restore Jessica’s heart to it’s rightful place and then… Miriam. As with all experiments, the testing is over and in order to continue I must bring it to an end. I will… miss her.” He was unsure why he would miss her, he felt no closer to her than he considered Pasteur would have been to his germ cultures. He would grieve for her in his own way, but he would have a new Miriam to work with. In fact, he would have two when he began Experiment 28.

Several hours later, after he had finished restoring Jessica to her whole self, he went over to Miriam who was staring at him, horrified that the man she had given herself to, a man whom she had loved at least on some level, could have done this to her. He had betrayed her, literally cut out her heart and given it to another woman.

“I know what you must think of me,” he said, looking at the hatred and sense of betrayal that was in her eyes, piercing in to whatever soul he had left. “Believe me, you will not be the last.” He ran his hands through her hair. “My Miriam. My love.” He turned off the machinery that was keeping her alive, despite not having a heart in her chest. Without the pumps and other devices that were acting as a makeshift heart, she would be dead in moments. “Hush, little baby, don’t say a word, daddy’s going to buy you a mockingbird. And if that mocking bird don’t sing, daddy’s gonna buy you a diamond ring…” By the time he’d finished gently singing the first verse of the song, she was gone. He sighed, wiped his hands on each other in a swift double movement and shrugged. “C’est la vie.”

He walked over to the cabinets that housed what was Experiment 28 and he tapped the keys and the panels opened to reveal two embryonic forms, Josephine and Jennifer. Josephine was an exact duplicate of Jessica’s base DNA, what she had been before the manipulations of Edgar Wyndham, and Jennifer was what she was now. There was no manipulation of the DNA undertaken, no tweaks here or there, and he couldn’t help but marvel at the equipment within Wundagore Mountain. It was protected on levels beyond anything he had suspected – the technology within had been safe from the electro-magnetic pulse that destroyed the Martian technology, and it had been safe from the powers of the Phoenix, defended by quasi-cosmic defences that the High Evolutionary had somehow obtained. It was the last pure remnant of the old world and nobody knew it was here. It had been abandoned long since and none had thought to check on it, or if they had, they had failed. It was a mystery for another time, and he had work to do. Eventually he would be found by the Pendragons, their sort always did manage to pull off the impossible from time to time, and he wanted to be ready by then. There was only one thing that he did have that would help in his experiments – a chronal fragment.

The fragment was, as far as he could tell, some kind of damaged temporal technology. He had heard rumours of a so-called Time War, where time had been damaged, but he had seen very little hard evidence of it, other than some odd changes in the time-line. As long is did not get in his way, he would let others fight their silly little war and do what he had to do to achieve the ultimate prize – godhood. He knew of the Green and the Bane and he wished to become the third member of a triumvirate. In either case, this fragment allowed him to increase the passage of time within a certain radius of the fragment, when subjected to a certain radiation, but he had found what he needed to activate it and he was going to use it to speed up time within the cloning chambers and turn the two clones from their embryonic state to youthful young women. He was going to be a father once more, though he felt no real love for them. They were experiments that if they worked would live and if not… he would dispose of them, but he needed to find out how the magic came to Jessica in the first place. Adam Crown had been marked as a Pendragon, having visions that led him to Caliburn, but this had not manifested until later in life. He was not much older than Jessica, in physical terms, though Jessica was older than Adam by quite a long way, spending decades in suspended animation. She had been destined to be a Pendragon, but had missed her chance because of that.

Due to the manipulations of the High Evolutionary, her bio-chemistry had been altered in order for her to be a weapon against the Martian invaders. It had been a radical move to save her life from radiation poisoning using radioactive spider-venom, and then altering her bio-chemistry in a subtle way so it would have an exceptional negative effect on the aliens, even if the Evolutionary didn’t think they would return in Jessica’s lifetime. He had read all of Wyndham’s notes over and over and in all his experiments he had never come across a mystical link, or an unexplained source of energy that could have been seen as a link to the Green. It hadn’t been there when she was a child otherwise he would have found it, Wyndham was too thorough to have missed it.

“Unless the mystical energy was being masked by the radiation poisoning!” he said, snapping is fingers. Jessica was not poisoned by radiation now, and the unique DNA he was using was also not contaminated, in which case he needed to add that variable in to Experiment 28. He would poison Jennifer with radiation and then introduce the cure that Wyndham had left, and conversely he would leave Josephine alone and monitor them both. He had to admit that this was fun and he went back to work. He would find the link to the mystical powers and take his rightful place in the destiny of humanity.

Winthrop looked on as Experiment 28 ran on. Within the cloning chambers he observed the changes in his two creations. Jennifer was starting to show the first signs of her spider-powers, small tufts of hair growing on the flats of her hands and feet, so small as to be almost imperceptible to the gaze of even those with the most heightened of senses. Magnified many times over he could see them and how each individual hair split into thousands of tiny extensions. These micro-hairs increased the number of contact points of the appendages with the surface, creating great adhesion. It was fascinating to see them grow as they did and soon they would grant the ability to wall-crawl, as it was so inelegantly described. He had created an all new Spider-Woman, which was good to know and now he knew that he could at least create an army of Spider-Men and Spider-Women. This would be useful later on, but it did not get him anywhere near to his ultimate goal of the link to the Green and he was hoping to see signs of that in Josephine.

What he was discovering, however, was not what he had expected.

He had been right about the radiation masking the energy field, as he had been about the look of Jessica needing to be right as well. There was now a sense to Josephine that he felt when he gazed on Jessica Drew. He could sense the power and the glory of the heir of the Pendragon. The science of radiation and magic of the Green obviously did not mix well. Perhaps there was some kind of natural inhibitor in the uranium that was able to block the magical influences. It was not something he had come across before, but there was still much he had to learn in that regard, but the main thing was that it was not the Green touching Josephine, but rather her natural bio-energy reaching out to the Green and waiting for a connection. Her body, the way it looked and was built in form and genetics, was combined to be a giant, mystical radio antenna. The power wasn’t within her, but rather reaching out to it.

“But what is it that marks the body out as being an antenna?” he mused. What also concerned him was the lack of response to Josephine’s call. There was no infusion of mystical energies taking place, nothing that he could identify as a mystical connection at all. There was simply nothing transmitting, or it was so weak that only someone already touched by the Green could receive it and Josephine was not. The look was obviously important and the only thing that Sinister could ascribe that to was the way that someone tuned a radio. The look was specific to the way the signal was received and he started to make various analyses on the body types of Jessica, Adam Crown and Miriam, to see what was similar in the case of the first two that was different in the case of Miriam. It was also similar, he surmised, in the way that the correct combination words would create an incantation and that others would not. You needed to know the words and how they worked and were said in order for there to be success, and what he needed to discover from the body types was the ‘words’ he was missing. The other thing was what caused it to act that way in the first place? What was there in Jessica that did not appear in Miriam? The only answer that he could think of was radiation, but that hadn’t been applied to Josephine, so really the question was what was there in Josephine that hadn’t been in Miriam? He went back to Miriam’s corpse and reviewed his information and there was something that he had missed.

When he had created Miriam there had been an abundance of magic due to the collapse of the Black Mass Barrier, but that had changed. The cleansing fires of the Phoenix had naturalised the balance between science and magic and there was no longer the influence of the Black Mass mystical energies that had been released on the collapse of the barrier. The environment was as natural now as it had ever been. The Black Mass energies had in essence neutralised the specific energies of the Green. Avalon had withdrawn and now he knew why – The Green could not create new soldiers in the great crusade, because until the Black Mass energies had harmonised with the rest of the world, those who could have had the abilities of the Pendragons had been forever denied them. Without the Phoenix, generations of Pendragons would never have surfaced. Every person had some connection with the mystical planes, just as every person had a connection with the astral planes – it was simply that not everyone could harness their connection, but it was within his power to aplify the mystical potential within a person’s natural aura, and all he had to do was attune it to the right level – too low, it would not work, too high, the connection would be too weak. He had what he needed and Sinister roared in triumph – he knew how to activate the connection to the Green, but it wasn’t the Green he wanted. He wanted to bypass the Green and go straight to the source magic, the one true pool from where the Green and the Bane had sprung.

It was all about the tuning and that was what he needed to resolve now. The very visions of Jessica Drew, Adam Crown and now Josephine were the key, the Rosetta Stone he needed to solve the mystery. Miriam was of the same body type as Jessica, but not the same face and it was that face that was a subtle difference. It had to be something to do with the face, but how? Facial features changes over time, marks, blemishes, the signs of getting older. How could the face change, yet still retain the connection? The antennae would be moving and the signal would get stronger or weaker…

“The touch of the Green,” said Sinister. Was that the key? Was the blessing given to the Pendragons the thing that did it? The thing that ensured the connection was locked in? Or even that the connection was made in the first place? He needed to go through the facial features and adjust the face to take in to account the aging process from birth to adulthood. “No,” he said, “I need to see it from later, when Jessica had emerged as Spider-Woman.” It was then that she had started to be pursued by Morgan-le-Fey. They’d been drawn to her, because of the subconscious connection to Arthur. He also needed to do the same to Adam Crown, around the time he started having the visions that drew him to Caliburn. He needed to find the commonalities and he steeped his fingers and again he examined them, looking for commonalities and then he noticed it. The proportions were in the same places – slightly different shapes, and designs but there was something there. It was in the numbers, he knew it, and he measured the positions of everything as they were and there were connections in all the right places.

“It’s a combination of things,” he said. “The accelerated potential within them, the physical appearance in the right proportions, and perhaps the same genetic basing…” He looked at his notes. “Perhaps I do have go back to the very beginning after all.” What he was after was in his grasp and then he sensed something and he knew the Pendragons were coming.

“Your friends are coming” he said to Jessica, “and you know what? I think they’re going to be too late. I almost have what I need. There’s just one last thing left for me to do…”

AUTHOR'S NOTES

The record-breaking fanfic series continues, with a focus on the new Sinister and what I hope is going to be further insight in to the Green, the Bane and the Pendragons themselves. I am heading somewhere with all this, I promise and it will be worth the wait as everything you think you know gets redefined! Not too ambitious then...

Anyway, I've a quick note about the last issue from my illustrious predecessor, Mr Barry Reese!

I'm glad you enjoyed it, and Adam's been a bit mistreated over the years, by both of us, and it's time he started living up to his reputation as the heir of King Arthur. Of course, he also believes a lot of his own press and he's got a lot to proove. Let's see if it really is good to be King! Thanks for the comments Barry, always appreciated.

See you next time for what promises to be quite a battle!

David
10/10/2007