 |
THE CORPS issue 17: Captain
Granbretan in,
|
Captain Granbretan soared over the city of Londra, searching for some way to be of assistance. The heroic intent was visible in his posture, the strong set of his jaw, and the purpose with which he shot across the skies on his way to aid those in need. As Le Soleil noted, it was a marked change from the spirit of his earlier career. Held, helpless, inside the now-sentient suit that was Captain Granbretan , Paul Peltier could only agree.
In the past he had wanted fame, fortune, fans, and respect. Now that he finally possessed all he ever sought after, thanks to the efforts of his tyrannical suit, it was cold and comfortless. No longer rewards for greatness but meaningless baubles that he would trade away without the slightest hesitation in exchange for the most meager of freedoms. That was what he wanted now, freedom, fame be damned.
All that Paul Peltier desired was the ability to move his own limbs again. To eat, to sleep, to act on his own will, at his determination; not when he felt the hair-thin wires the suit sent digging into his skin spark and stimulate his nerves. He wanted his primal right, to scream and rail against the unnatural, alien thing that had usurped his body and maneuvered him about the sky like a marionette of flesh, but he could not. The suit defeated him in the simplest, most humiliating way. It held his mouth shut, containing what howls of rage Paul's damaged and neglected vocal cords could muster safely inside his throat where they would not alert the outside world to his plight.
After eight days of such callous treatment, over a week of constant heroism without food nor water nor rest, Paul could feel his body failing him. His stomach, having given up hope of receiving new sustenance, cued his other organs to being demolishing themselves to provide fuel instead. Unsurprisingly, he could feel it. The sensation of enzymes racing through his bloodstream, ripping is body apart at a molecular level, was akin to a severe stomachache. The kind of stomachache one would suffer after ingesting several pounds of razor blades and broken glass, then washing it all down with a shot of lye. Excruciating, even through the mists of delirium that encircled Paul's dehydrated, exhausted brain. The pain reinforced a dreaded fact, he was dying, that much was certain. The only question was when.
As the suit steered them both towards the nearest danger Paul let his fevered mind wander, as he often did now that his consciousness was no longer critical to saving the day, and sank back into the memories of his past. The most recent events of his stunningly disappointing superhero career, the long ago days when he was a simple college student working his way through school, and the most commonly-visited memory, mid-range in the entire scheme, of his first ill-advised trip to Darkmoor.
Paul was glad he was doing this, glad to be following that lovely foreign tradition from the Confederated States and taking a year off from his studies at the university to "find himself" as they called it. He was also glad to be out of the hostel's kitchen. While washing dishes in exchange for room and board was extremely fair, but the smell of detergent for the last three -or was it four?- hours became tiresome to say the least. His hands still smelled faintly of the super-concentrated soap, Paul was sure it had permeated through his thick latex gloves, but the cool night breeze proved strong enough to chase away the odious chemical scent and replace it with the aroma of wet grass and moss.
Despite the frequent trips camping his family had taken in his youth, Paul was what those living in the country would call a "city boy" through and through. Given the choice he rarely left his urban haunts, the libraries and classrooms of the Londra University, the scores of coffee shops and bookstores scattered throughout the city's endless streets, and occasionally the metropolis' more sinister underbelly. A netherworld of pulsating beats and neon lights blazing over smoke-wreathed figures. His was a world of concrete and thunderous noise, difficult to reconcile with the tranquil solitude of the countryside. Oddly enough, a nighttime walk seemed to bridge the gap with ease, bringing a strange commonality to both the gently rolling, moonlit hills he now traveled and the hard asphalt streets of Londra proper, illuminated by the harsh municipal vapor-lamps, which were so familiar.
Basking in the pale moonlight, strong enough to bring forth surreal shadows from the meadow flora, Paul hiked across the pasture and fallow fields before him, heedless of the passing of time or his body through space. Visiting this small rural town had never been part of the plan for Paul. The itinerary for his journey of self-discovery led him to great urban and cultural centers of Europe, yet there was something that compelled him to stop in the tiny backwater village, if only for one night. In the most primitive, reptilian zones of his psyche Paul already knew what he was looking for in the darkness-draped countryside. The rest of his mind had to wait until he stumbled into the ring of standing stones to realize. Darkmoor, that was what called to him.
An ancient ruin, far older than the knowledge of man, crafted on rough-hewn basalt blocks; deep sable in hue save for the blotches of blood red and ashen grey lichens, Darkmoor was a place of mystery. Though he had never visited the Neolithic monument before, it was familiar to his thanks to the stigma branded on it by the masses. To the curious, Darkmoor was a portal to something beyond the ken of mortal man. Whether it was created by human hands or by a force not of this earth hardly mattered, it was a key, a hint at something greater. To the fearful it was a setting for the violent cults of gothic horror, steeped in blood ritual and sacrifice to the pits where their mad gods lurked, gibbering eternally in the dank and lightless depths.
After watching the ruin materialize around him, phantomlike from the darkness, Paul felt he had to agree in part with the former school of thought. The stones of Darkmoor, while perhaps not home to nameless creeping horrors, were certainly otherworldly. He would have left, but standing there inside the circle filled him with a strange sense of purpose; as if the entire weight of all the history, all the events past in that very spot were bearing down on his soul. Somehow Paul knew he was destined to be there, at Darkmoor that very night, but the reason why escaped him.
Turning his attention from the inside of the circle and directing it instead to inspecting the ancient rocks ringing him more closely, Paul felt a strange sensation humming urgently in the back of his mind. Not a physical, hair-raising alert; but a subtler, almost psychic warning that something had changed, that he was no longer alone. It was an impatient vibe, calling for immediate observance. Paul found himself whipping around as quickly as human reflexes allowed, his body acting purely on instinct.
There, lying splayed across the stone slab that served as the ruin's central dais was a... costume. The garment seemed to be nothing more than an innocuous full-body spandex disguise, similar to those of the American superheroes; yet there was something about it, an unearthly luminescent sheen that mutely shrieked for him to pick it up, to put it on. It was his costume, meant to be worn by no other. Paul took a shaky step back, not truly wanting to be in the presence of the ethereal thing, then darted forward, almost against his will, to snatch the costume and raced back to the hostel.
That night was the end, the cessation of even the slightest normalcy Paul could have ever hoped to claim. As soon as he put on the costume of Captain Granbretan he ceased to be Paul Peltier, average college student, and became not what he always dreamed of, but instead what people had always told him he would become. A failure. A superhero for hire who couldn't buy a cry for help. The people of Londra would rather burn in their homes than have him save them, every woman he met was terrified of him, and the press murdered him at every turn.
Lonely, despised by those he meant to save, his reputation even lower than the mud the Londra Match tried to drag it through... It was enough to drive a man to drink, or to shoot. Paul had the target pistol his father once owned tucked away in his desk, bottom left drawer. He had never been tempted to use it, not even in the throes of his deepest depressions, but it was there, the knowledge of it whispering on the edges of his consciousness whenever life became too trying.
It took a year and a half, eighteen months of solid suffering and abuse, before Paul realized his superhero career was a farce, that it brought him nothing, and he decided to end it. His father's pistol remained in its drawer, untouched though never forgotten, as the failed hero flew over Londra to the countryside, en route to send his costume back to whence it came so that it might torment a new soul. In hindsight, Paul could wholeheartedly admit he should've chosen the pistol.
As he flew through the transition from city smog to clear, wild skies Paul noted something new. The suit which had always responded so well to his commands faltered at small requests; dropping lower and losing altitude when urged to move forward, refusing to accelerate when ordered to; small things, but malfunctions that could prove fatal during a rescue or heroic exploit when every second matters. If the suit was broken, he began to think, maybe it was for the best that he was getting rid of it. He had no way of fixing it, and the thing was likely to kill him should it go haywire at the instant when he was relying on it to save him.
The closer he got to Darkmoor, the more often and more strongly Paul could feel the costume hitch. When he finally touched down on the darkened field just outside the ruins and made to walk into the circle of stones, the suit jerked violently in the opposite direction, refusing to step forwards. Paul remembered the costume's rebellion clearly, as if he was still in that moment; the instant the cold terror struck his heart upon realizing he couldn't move, couldn't will the suit off of him. The second the suit started moving on its own, dragging his encased limbs with it as it took to the air and sped back to Londra. The agony-filled hours that followed as the suit burrowed its metallic terminals, once resting benignly against his skin on the inner surface of the fabric, into his flesh, attaching themselves directly to his nervous system and claiming his body as its own. Paul could hardly believe it had only been eight days ago, just one hundred and ninety-two hours since he was captured by his costume. It seemed so much longer.
The suit swooped down towards the thinly-leafed canopy of a city tree, reaching Paul's arms out to grasp something. A kitten, it seemed, trapped up in the high branches mewling for help, but Paul couldn't concentrate on it. Hungry beyond satiating, dying of thirst, unendurably tired, he felt himself slipping away into the blessed oblivion he had lusted after ever since the costume started acting on its own. The suit noticed as its host's pulse wavered, weakened, and then disappeared completely, but hardly cared. After all, it had the body, what did it need it alive for?
She had lived in Londra all her life without ever running into the kind of crimes that occurred in the city's seedy underbelly, but here she was, in the side alley not ten yards from her own doorstep, getting mugged. It was unreal. She almost laughed as she stared down the barrel of the crook's gun and felt her purse torn from her grasp. Mugged? Of all the stupid ways to die in the city… Things like this just didn't' happen to people like her, they just didn't. She had only been taking her trash out to the dumpster! She closed her eyes, preparing for a bullet, heard the gunshot, but didn't feel a thing.
Opening them, a quizzical look on her face, she noted there was a man in a slightly metallic-looking bodysuit currently beating her would-be assailant to a bloody pulp. Her hero! Watching, still a little stunned, she began to wonder just who the masked man was. The costume he wore looked familiar, like the Captain Granbretan who the Le Soleil was always talking about. If it was really him… Wow. She'd have to tell her friends about this, she had been saved by the famous Captain Granbretan .
A rather loud, rather sickening crunch brought her attention back from her daydreams of popularity and fame by proxy to the present where she sat huddled in the dirty little alley just over from her loft. The creep who just moment ago had a gun trained on her was lying, looking disturbingly mangled and maimed, atop the rusted dumpster to her right; the hero who had saved her was standing stiffly with his back to her a few paces away, her stolen purse clutched tight in his hand. In the calm after the beating, once her heart stopped pounding as the adrenaline wore off, she found she could smell something… off.
It was a powerful, fetid scent that overwhelmed the dumpster's stench. It brought to mind the smell of the college dorm she had spent a few sorry semesters in years ago, and the aroma of rotted meat that hung around the slaughterhouse nearby her grandparent's country farm in the summers. Yes, a guy could work up a sweat fighting, but surely the captain couldn't get that ripe from a short scuffle against a mere mugger! Now that she thought about it, the hero had looked stiff and awkward in his movements, like an old man with a bad back. Maybe something was wrong with him…
Before she asked what ailed her savior, the costumed figure turned towards her, displaying exactly what was wrong.
"O-Oh my god… Your face… It's-! You're-!" The proper word, the one she was searching for, was "dead," but the only thing her frantic shock-addled mind could produce was "zombie." The face that peered down at her from the hero's helmet-like spandex was a decayed and ravaged visage more suited to a mummy than a man. Half of the thing's deathlike face was sallow skin, drawn tight across the underlying bone like a cracked canvas; the lower portion of the head lay completely bare, with the ragged flayed flesh hanging loosely in shreds, displaying the porous jawbone and skull beneath. One of its clouded eyes had been punctured, the gelatinous gobs of vitreous humor tracing wet streaks down the remains of its ruined face, though the thing seemed not to notice.
She didn't know what this horrifying thing standing before her was, but what she did know was even if it had once been human, it sure as hell wasn't anymore. She scrambled backwards away from the thing in a half- crabwalk half-crawl, her sensible three-inch heels skittering against the pavement. The thing, as if noticing her stark-raving terror, cocked its head slightly to the side and took a tentative step forward.
"Arrrre. Youall right missss?" The thing's voice was scratched and guttural, rasping out through the decomposing vocal cords like a prolonged death rattle. It's pacing was utterly alien, drawing out consonants and mashing together words, as if the speaker was a novice to language. The only way she could reply was with a shriek as she turned and fled down the alley to the next street over, her purse long forgotten.
Darkmoor glistened, its rain-soaked stones glittering wetly in each flash of lightning. The storm had raged all day, carrying on into the night and keeping the hordes of camera-toting tourists away from the ruins. While it no doubt annoyed the vacationers who had traveled so far, the harsh weather suited the costume just fine. The inclement conditions allowed for a measure of privacy and relative peace to work in while the costume went about dismantling and absorbing what was left of Paul Peltier's corpse.
The reactions it received from every one of the humans it came into contact with since a few days after the death of its host had done much to convince that it couldn't continue flying about, not as it had been. Perhaps the humans disliked the smell of rot and death, perhaps they didn't appreciate the look of Peltier's exposed flesh; the costume could hardly fathom the minds of those humans. Whatever the reason, the remains of Paul's body inside it were drawing unwanted negative attention to the costume and so it set to work, slowly stripping the corpse apart protein by protein.
Maybe, in time, it would be able to completely understand humans, and possibly even learn to preserve a body for more than a week; but for the present it would wait patiently, biding its time in the ruins. Another compatible host body would come along soon enough. There were plenty of possible candidates on the isle of Granbretan , plenty of chances to experiment. The costume would get it right, eventually.
Captain Krypton!
Black Knight & Squire!
Meggan!
Prince Namor, the Aqua-Man!
... THE EXCALIBUR FRIENDS!
in ... "The Master Menace of Mastermind, Part Four!" by Michael Norwitz
Kylun and Cerise were active at the computer monitors, tracking down emergency calls from the blackouts and coordinating relief efforts. Suddenly there was a call on the Secret Line.
Kylun went to pick it up. "It must be one of the Excalibur Friends trying to reach us. Maybe they need our help!"
"Why would they need help from a couple of kids, Kylun?" Cerise chortled, "You know, they're probably calling just to tell us that they've captured Mastermind at last."
Kylun picked up the phone, and recoiled in shock as a holographic form was projected from the receiver. "Where are the Excalibur Friends?" bellowed the giant form of Mastermind.
"Jinkies! how did you get in here?" worried Cerise.
Mastermind laughed deprecatingly. "It was a simple effort to track you down through your modem lines, as you have been acting as a touchstone for rescue teams across the country. Now, give me the passwords for the secret files, so that I may use the Excalibur Friends' weaknesses against them!"
"Never!" shouted Kylun. "Are you ready, sis?"
"Sure am!" she cried out, and the two managed to touch their hands together, and stand, time suspended, as their bodies glowed with strange energies as they chanted, "Pendragon Kids powers ... activate!"
"Shape of ... a cerise high-energy particle beam!"
"Sound of ... a sonic boom!" BOOM!
Mastermind recoiled from the sudden blast of sound, which shattered glass all along the interior of the Lighthouse of Justice. Then he howled in pain as his holographic form was disrupted by Cerise's particle beam.
"I think we've got him on the run, sis!" said Kylun once he resumed his humanoid form.
"Not so easy!" And the lights in the headquarters dimmed as Mastermind absorbed the memory from the headquarters' own computers, increasing his power. He gestured hypnotically, and holographic images of the Legion of Slaymasters, the Excalibur Friends' greatest foes, appeared to harass the twins.
"Jinkies! I think this is too much for us tow to handle by our lonesome!" said Cerise, as she dodged an attack by the villains.
"I agree, sis!" Kylun ran over to assist her. "Pendragon Kids powers ... activate!"
"Shape of ... a cerise band!"
"Sound of ... an emergency signal watch!" zeezeezeezeezeezeezeezeezeezeezee ...
As Cerise formed a circular band which binds the holographic villains together, Kylun summoned Captain Krypton.
"Too late ... too late" leered Mastermind, as he approached the hapless pair.
"Never too late!" shouted a familiar voice, as the Excalibur Friends soared through the door into the Lighthouse of Justice.
"Ah, now I shall have my revenge!" shouted Mastermind.
"Not if the we have any say in the matter," insisted Prince Namor.
As if by a burst of electronic adrenaline, the holographic Legion of Slaymasters freed themselves from Cerise's bonds and attacked the heroes.
The heroes were soon surrounded. But weakened by their recent battles, they were slowly beaten back. Captain Krypton noted, "These ... images ... are a lot more powerful than the originals, Mastermind. What are you up to?"
Mastermind gloated, "I have been siphoning power from all across Britain, feeding them into my creations. Giving them enough strength to defeat even you!"
"Holy Power-Ups Black Knight," said the Squire, "he may be right!"
Black Knight had his sword deflected by one of the holographic opponents. "Not yet, chum," he said, "We still have ... one ace in the hole!"
"Don't think you can bluff me, caped crusader," Mastermind said. "I ... wait ... what is going on?"
The Excalibur Friends watched as the holographic Legion of Slaymasters dissipated. Teeny tiny sparks of light flew out from the computer console towards him, and Mastermind's image started to flicker, as soon he blinked out. "Noooooo.... " he cried.
Meggan looked at Black Knight, "A good move! what did you do?"
Black Knight smiled, "Not I ... a mutual friend of ours pulled some tricks with our electrical systems." He gestured gallantly.
A teeny tiny form waved from the countertop. "Have you already forgotten your old pal Micro-Arrow? My microscopic arrows disrupted the systems Mastermind was running on, and I was able to trap him in one small subroutine."
Black Knight nodded, "Thanks for the help, Micro-Arrow! I suspected we'd need your specialist skills, which is why I gave you a call."
Mastermind grumbled from the computer console, "I almost defeated you all! And I would have, too, if it weren't for the delaying tactics from those meddling kids!"
The Excalibur Friends laughed.