Virgil Salvage was holding court deep within the Brazilian rain forest, explaining how he had helped Alexander the Great defeat the Persian army at the battle of Issus. The man sounded like he knew what he was talking about, but Henry St. Ides had his doubts. In the eight days Tech-Spectre had been working for the arch villain, Salvage had claimed to either have advised or actually been Saul, Genghis Khan, William the Conqueror, and Charles XII of Sweden. Perhaps after 15,000 years of living senility had finally settled in.
The others in the tent didn’t seem to share Henry’s doubts. Messier, Salvage’s right hand man, hung on every word. And the child, an Indian boy no more than fourteen, never spoke, but watched the powerfully built man with awe. Henry wondered how the kid fit into all of this.
All he knew were scraps. St. Ides had been sent to Peru by the American government’s premiere superhero Mr. Epitome to join up with Salvage’s crew. The mission had two parts: first, he was to find out what one of the most dangerous men on Earth was up to, and second he was to inject a hypo-gun into Salvage’s brain to draw a sample of stem cells. One task would have been much easier without having to fulfill the other.
Henry had made his costume invisible, so to his compatriots he appeared to be in clothes more suitable for a jungle expedition, rather than a state of the art stealth suit. He had used a cover identity from his days as a free-lancer to get himself hired as a guard for Salvage’s operation, whatever it was. When asked about the job, the bearded neanderthal said he was feeling nostalgic, and then narrowed his red-rimmed eyes in a gesture that halted any further inquiry.
Based on the size and make-up of the crew Salvage had put together, Henry guessed the criminal mastermind wanted something cleared and recovered. An old base, perhaps, or some almost-lost temple holding treasures of a nearly-forgotten culture. The group of fifteen men had traveled by foot through the dense and dangerous terrain for six days. Messier had told Henry earlier they were close to their objective.
“Has the boss been here before?” he had asked, fishing for information.
“Virgil Salvage has stridden every inch of this planet,” the muscled Belgian replied a little too reverentially for Tech Spectre’s taste. Now, with Salvage before him, Ides thought he would try again.
“So, did you have GPS technology and wireless modems last time you were here, sir?” Henry tried to make a joke of it.
“Your kind had not even been brought to the New World the last time I was here, Gibson.”
Tech-Spectre assumed his kind meant black. Salvage kept talking.
“Don’t misunderstand me, Gibson. I bear no antipathy towards any ethnic group, for this idea of cultural diversity is foolish. We all came from the Mother Continent, did we not? From Africa?”
“Well, I’m from Grand Rapids, myself.”
The immortal, off on another tangent, ignored his quip, “In fact, Donovan Gibson, you and I might very well be related. I’ve cut a wide swath in my lifetime. Sex is one of the few things I have not grown tired of.”
“That’s good news for those of us who haven’t yet made it to senior citizen status.”
Messier looked ready to shoot Henry, but Salvage was enjoying his conversation with the brazen hireling, “I have not yet come to my golden years. Though this quest will be the first step in that direction. It has been centuries since I have ruled the known world, and I have the inclination to do so again.”
Henry saw an opportunity, “Hey, sign me up. You sound like a man who knows how to party.”
“Oh, yes. If the Romanovs were still around they would concur,” Salvage laughed, getting ready to regale Henry with the story of the joke he had played on Russia’s last czar as the mad monk Rasputin. This was not what the high-tech spy wanted to hear.
*****
The expedition spent another four days traveling through the Amazon jungle. Tech-Spectre, never a fan of the great outdoors, was happy his invisible stealth suit provided him with extra protection against the heat and stinging insects. He marched in the middle of the pack, near Salvage himself. It was midday when the scouts at the head of the line began shouting. The men double-timed it to catch up and see what had excited the forward guard so.
It was a clearing, shrouded by the canopy of the rain forest. A ziggurat squatted under hundreds of years of encroaching vegetation. Virgil Salvage was pleased.
“Set up my tent. Clear the temple’s surface. Remove the overgrowth that blocks the skyline. In that order.”
Tech-Spectre volunteered to climb the structure’s graded sides and tear away the flora that shrouded it. It would give him a chance to get some pictures of it with his digital micro-camera. The ziggurat was covered with hieroglyphics, the majority of which seemed to represent the sun or phases of the moon. The symbols reminded him that there was a solar eclipse scheduled tomorrow. This was probably not a coincidence.
Henry St. Ides got the sinking feeling he was going to be wading through some intense supernatural bullshit in the next twenty four hours.
*****
It was midnight several time zones away as Martin Sesno and a kid he was selling to ran for their lives. Their drug buy had been interrupted when the package Martin gave to the grimy, acne-scarred teen was shot out of his hand.
The bag lay punctured on the ground behind them, hit by the long translucent shaft of an arrow designed to be all but invisible to the naked eye. A figure strode past the site of the interrupted drug bust, wrenching the arrow from the ground and nocking it again.
The second shot tore through Martin’s too-heavy-for-summer Starter’s jacket, sending him spinning. He got a brief look at his attacker, tall and slender, before he was able to round the corner of the darkened alleyway onto a deserted side street.
“Ooof!” the buyer tripped and ran into him, almost knocking him to the ground. Martin pushed the smaller kid down hoping he would serve as a distraction for whatever mental case was after them.
The archer took the corner with smooth precision, lifting her bow high and firing another arrow. It zipped through the air, a streak of black against the night sky, and arced downward. The trajectory brought the shaft down through Martin’s left Timberland just as he planted to take another corner. The arrow pinned his foot to the ground. His leg buckled and down he went, screaming in agony.
From his prone position he got a better look at his attacker. It was a woman, close to six feet tall, carrying a black recurve bow in her right hand. She wore a sleeveless black tee shirt, black carpenter jeans, and high top running shoes. A grey blindfold completely covered her eyes, tied under a black short-brimmed baseball cap. She also had on the traditional grey armguards, wrist guards, and shooting gloves of a competitive archer. She cast another arrow at Martin as he went for his gun, shattering its barrel and leaving him at her mercy. Then she went to work on the kid.
He had gotten up swinging, but the woman feinted to avoid his charge. She then kicked at the back of his knee, which forced him to the ground. Martin watched in horror as the archer grabbed the top of the boy’s head and with a flourish drew a short curved blade and slashed it across his neck. The geyser of blood was visible from ten yards away. The archer left her first victim and, knife in hand, walked towards Martin Sesno. He began begging.
“Please, please don’t kill me. I have money. Take it, please.”
The dark-haired woman didn’t say a word as she pulled the missile from his foot. She wiped the blood from the broadhead on his teal Paradopolis Turkeys jacket before replacing it in her back quiver.
“I’ve got his-” he nodded towards the dead boy’s figure, “five hundred, and I can get more. Please, I have a kid.”
Finally she spoke, “What a shame it is some poor child has you for a father figure. Give me the money.”
Martin complied, handing over the cash with trembling, bloodied fingers.
“I’m going to let you live, Martin Sesno. But our business tonight is not concluded. I require sources in Mr. Velvet’s organization, even ones as insignificant as you.”
“I know lots of stuff about Crushed Velvet,” he offered hopefully, seeing a chance for survival.
“Tell no one of our encounter, Sesno. I have other contacts in this city, and if I learn you’ve violated my trust you are a dead man. Now leave.”
He awkwardly rose. The girl, for that’s all she was, despite her size and demeanor, sheathed the knife, “Run,” she advised.
Martin Sesno ran as fast as his broken foot would allow.
Artemis watched him hobble off before turning her attention back to the limp figure she had left on the ground thirty feet away. She walked over to the body and knelt beside it.
“How’s that for hardcore?” she asked the corpse.
Jerry Luckbridge, third year drama major at the University of Paradopolis, opened his eyes, “Your kick hurt,” he replied.
“Sorry. Guess I’m not as good an actor as you, Jer.”
Jerry wiped the stage blood from his face and pulled the blood pack and pump used to simulate his slit throat from under his sweatshirt, “We need to get out of here before someone sees us. You got another target lined up?”
Charlotte Ouk took off her cap and teased her short glossy hair, “Yeah. There’s a pawnbroker who supposedly holds cash for Velvet’s dealers. Tuesday night I want us to pay him a visit and add him to the infrastructure.”
Artemis gave the shorter man a peck on the cheek and nocked an arrow. When cast it released an opaque cord no thicker than fishing line. The arrow struck home somewhere above their field of vision before powerful micro-winches in the arrow’s shaft reeled in the line with enough force to pull the 140 pound teenager skyward. She gave her partner a wave.
“I’ll call you,” she said happily, before disappearing over a tenement’s roof and out of sight.
*****
The ziggurat stood now as it had four centuries ago, clean of debris. Torches now dotted the structure, giving off a sulfurous stench and bathing the area in a gauzy green sheen. The partial eclipse had begun.
Virgil Salvage had taken a position near the top of the pyramid. He was wearing a set of purple and silver robes and was just beginning an elaborate chant. At the pinnacle stood the boy, dressed in similar robes. Despite the surrealism of the scene he was keeping his composure. The rest of Salvage’s crew had taken positions at the bottom of the temple.
Tech-Spectre decided now was the time. Salvage was obviously preoccupied, and had given orders not to be disturbed until he finished his ritual. Henry remembered enough astronomy to know it took the better part of an hour for the umbra of the moon’s shadow to fall at an exact spot, and figured it was in the path of totality- those few minutes the sun would be in full eclipse- for the ceremony to reach its climax. So now was the time to sneak up and drill a hole in Salvage’s brain pan in order to get the stem cells he needed to complete part one of the mission. That would also stop whatever Virgil was up to. Mr. Epitome had sent him just to observe, but Tech-Spectre figured the hero wouldn’t mind if he prevented whatever horrible thing that was about to occur to that kid from taking place.
He used the suit to become fully invisible, and crept up the ziggurat. Pulling the hypo-gun from his backpack, he snuck up behind Salvage and leveled it to the base of his crumpled skull.
Then he froze. Some force seized him as he stepped towards Virgil, trapping him. He could not even phase free.
Salvage permitted himself a satisfied smile when he realized the synaptic disruptor field had caught an unseen assailant. Then he continued the ritual.
*****
As Tech-Spectre expected, it was when the ziggurat was under the total solar eclipse that the ceremony reached its crescendo. Salvage finished his gesticulations just as the boy raised a small flat stone, no larger than a quarter, and lined it up to the eclipse so that the sun’s corona bordered the disc.
Then the boy changed. His body stretched and twisted. Gnarled muscles formed on thin limbs. Skin became dark as ebony. Silver tattoos were scrawled by hands unseen across his new form. On the right side of the creature’s face a sickle shaped mark blossomed, a crescent moon against a black background.
Free at last, Eclipsinox celebrated by leaping down into a crowd of Salvage’s men and slaughtering them.
*****
“Whoah,” Scott Bunsen said as his cosmic senses kicked in while drying his family’s dinner dishes, causing him to nearly drop one.
“Trouble?” his wife Janeen asked. At this point in their marriage she was used to her husband’s mind wandering, seeing as he was psychically linked to all of reality.
“Yes. Something big in South America,” Scott put down his drying rag.
“Got time for a kiss before you go?” she playfully asked.
“Always.”
After the two embraced, Scott Bunsen used the energies that made him Protector of the Multiverse to clothe himself in the red white and blue costume of Amazing Guy.
“I’m leaving the lasagna pan for you, mister,” his wife teased him one last time before he disappeared in a nimbus of light. Janeen would try to go back to cleaning the kitchen of their LittleSmallville home, but couldn’t seem to find the resolve. Her spouse was one of the most powerful and experienced heroes on the planet, and faced death countless times. But she also knew there had been other Protectors before Scott, and that it was not an occupation you retired from.
*****
“I can’t hear you over that noise,” Virgil Salvage told Eclipsinox.
The Dark Lord of a Mystery Mythology crushed the skull of his captive Messier to quiet the screams. Then, tucking his corpse under his arm, Eclipsinox climbed the ziggurat to parlay with the master villain.
“I said: You’re still alive, Salvage.”
“As sure as the sun shines in the sky I will always live, old friend.”
Eclipsinox snapped a finger from his latest victim and popped it into his mouth, “The sun. How much time do we have?”
“Not much. But the world has changed a great deal since you were imprisoned. There now exists the means to check the power of your nemesis.”
Salvage finally turned to acknowledge the sole surviving member of his entourage. Tech-Spectre stood immobilized and invisible, but the immortal neanderthal’s senses were keen. He could smell his would-be attacker.
“Mr. St. Ides, correct? What are you doing here?”
Tech-Spectre was ready to tell the man the unvarnished truth when a voice from the heavens interrupted.
“Everybody on the ground now!” Amazing Guy ordered.
Henry was never so happy to see a superhero in his life.
*****
Scott Bunsen detected three beings below him: an undying caveman, a resurrected personification of forgotten evil, and a transparent spymaster. Quite a trio. The giant dusky cannibal was what drew him here, so he elected to neutralize Eclipsinox first. He created a cylindrical containment energy construct around it.
Eclipsinox held the small disc-shaped stone that had triggered his transformation before his eyes. A bolt of dark energy shot from it, punching through the force cage.
Virgil Salvage drew a pistol from beneath his robes and fired at the Protector of the Multiverse. It hit Amazing Guy with variable-frequency plasma spike designed to disrupt electro-magnetic fields all along the spectrum. If the hero had been a rank amateur it might have crippled him, but Scott simply recalibrated his energy signature and gave Salvage a taste of his own medicine, shorting out every mechanical device the villain carried. Including the device that kept Tech-Spectre immobilized.
Henry pounced on Salvage, jamming the hypo-gun in the back of his head. The would-be world conqueror shuddered and fell. Tech-Spectre hoped he had gotten what he needed and phased into the jungle.
“OK, ugly, let’s see how tough you are without the pet rock,” Amazing Guy created a clamp-shaped energy construct and grabbed Eclipsinox’s wrist with it. Another clamp tried to pry the monster’s fist open.
Eclipsinox roared. Despite the intense force holding his arm in place he brought it eye level again. This time the energy blast hit Amazing Guy himself, shattering his personal force field and sending him tumbling to the earth. He managed to land relatively gracefully in the top of a nearby tree.
“Come down here and face me, wretch,” Scott’s power allowed him to translate the beast’s threat.
Amazing Guy willed an energy mace into his hands and swooped down to hammer his foe with it. Eclipsinox was sent rocketing into the ziggurat, caving half of it in.
“Too late to put you back in the box, so we’ll try this,” Scott shrouded himself in energy and rushed Eclipsinox. He grabbed him and flew up and east.
The twisted god laughed, “You are a fool if you think you can match my strength!” he wrapped his blood-caked hands around Scott’s neck and squeezed.
The leader of the JBH felt the pressure on his force field beginning to build. Eclipsinox was powerful, but a little too enthused about being free to realize where he was going. Amazing Guy accelerated to Mach 5.
Within seconds AG and his passenger had cleared the field of totality. Soon they were out of the eclipse all together, and into the gaze of Eclipsinox’s greatest enemy.
“No!!” he managed to wail as the sun’s rays burned away his malignancy that corrupted his host. Eclipsinox’s form drifted away in ashes, leaving behind an exhausted teenage boy, a native of the jungle that had held the evil force captive.
“No,” Tollmaqi said weakly, “I’ve failed. I’ve failed us all.”
*****
“So he was part of an order that tried to prepare hosts for the Eclipsinox demon?” Janeen asked her husband later.
“Yeah, poor kid,” Scott sat down on the couch next to his wife, “The idea is the host should be pure enough to contain Eclipsinox. Then he is supposed to commit ritual suicide and end the threat of the ‘Dark God’ forever.”
“Nice religion. How did Salvage get involved?”
“From what Tollmaqi told me, it looks like Salvage knew about the ritual and tempted the boy to leave his village before he was ready to face his destiny. Virgil played on the kid’s pride.”
“It all worked out OK though,” Janeen lifted her husband’s arm and draped it over her shoulders. Snuggling close, she continued to tie up loose ends, “You captured Salvage, and dispersed Eclipsinox. Too bad you can’t figure out a way to destroy that stone that summons him.”
“I’m going to give it to Xander and see what he makes of it. He is Earth’s Sorcerer Supreme, after all. I still need to figure out how Tech-Spectre fits in this.”
“He’s a wanted criminal, right? Just find him and bring him in.”
“Yeah, but he did help me subdue Salvage. And it seems half the heroes of the Parodyverse are wanted by some government agency for something, so I’m not sure what to do,” Scott Bunsen kissed the top of Janeen’s head.
“Shame your cosmic awareness doesn’t help with judgment calls,” she said sleepily.
“Heh. I’ll contact Mr. Epitome once he’s back from Sybia. Tech-Spectre is one of his old bad guys. He might have a better idea of what the deal is.”
Scott picked up the moon face in miniature that contained the howling spirit of Eclipsinox and examined it. Sighing, he stuffed the rock in his pocket, and roused his wife for bed.
Next: Distractions
Well, Distractions is already up. Next is Cyborgia, which I'll put up when I get a couple stories in the stockpile.
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