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Post By IW offers a little topical fanfiction Wed Dec 01, 2004 at 05:46:41 am EST |
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Avengers: Underground #1 | |
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| Explanatory Note: Marvel comics’ Avengers series, telling the tales of Earth’s mightiest heroes, recently reached a watershed in which the team was shattered and disbanded (Avengers #503 and Avengers: Finale). This story seeks to continue the story from that “divergence point”, as part of a collection of fan-fiction stories assembled by Ozbot at Avengers Anew. The principal characters in this story at the property of Marvel Comics, and this isn’t a challenge to their legal rights. Avengers: Underground #1 The tombstone was five hundred years old, and it was splintered to pieces by the tree of bone that had grown through it. Long spiked creepers of yellowed calcium formed a gruesome vine that had grown from the shattered sarcophagus-side, rising in twisted arcs to punch through the furniture of the room and shred the man who had sat there. The interior of the library vault was ribboned with the bizarre bone growths, as if some primeval thorn bush had been suddenly petrified. “You see why I called you, Dane.” the Archbishop said. Dane Whitman has seen crime scenes before now. Murder investigations were nothing new to him. But this one had to be the weirdest. “I see,” he agreed. Scene of crime officers were picking their way through the debris. The underground chamber had been a repository of ancient books and manuscripts since the middle ages, and dozens of priceless tomes were scattered carelessly over the blood-stained floor. “Am I okay being here?” Dane asked the cleric, glancing at the investigators. “If you can tell me what the hell to do with this flaming mess, you’re more than welcome, chummy,” called the phlegmatic police inspector squatting over the body while the pathologists took their measurements. “Pardon the language, your grace.” “I hear worse than that in my staff meetings,” the Archbishop replied. “I said worse than that when they showed me what had happened here.” Dane Whitman inspected the fascinating architecture of bonework now choking up the room. “Careful,” Inspector Gallowglass warned him. “Those spikes are razor sharp.” “I might need a little background,” Dane admitted to the Archbishop. “What’s this place and who is the dead man, for starters.” Dane’s old tutor nodded. “Canon Cheyney’s our resident scholar of medieval history. Or he was, poor fellow. And this is our aumbrey, York Minster’s document and treasure house. We haven’t stored treasure here for a couple of centuries, but it remains a secure cool dark place for our manuscripts and old ledgers.” The Archbishop glanced ruefully at the wreckage. “Well, it was,” he added. Dane noticed the wreckage of an oil lamp in the part of the room that had suffered from fire. A tine of bone had grown right through the glass of the lantern, and it was the spilled fluid that had set the fire which had claimed dozens of priceless volumes. “No electric lights?” he puzzled. “Not down here,” the Archbishop admitted. He waited until the police inspector was out of earshot before murmuring to Dane, “Tradition says it would affect the, um the wards protecting this place.” The Black Knight began to realise why he’d been called in. “Wards as in… magic?” “Ancient blessings,” the clergyman suggested. “And you thought I’d understand when the police didn’t because…” “Because you’re my only former scholar who went on to take a doctorate in astrophysics and who owns a magic sword.” Dane shook his head. “Not any more. I haven’t had the Ebony Blade for some time, and I haven’t been able to summon the Sword of Light and Shield of Night since… well, you saw that tragedy at Avengers Mansion on Sky News, right?” Few people with access to TVs in the world could have failed to witness the end of an era as Earth’s mightiest heroes had fallen amidst inexplicable strangeness. “Yes, I’m sorry about that,” the Archbishop condoled. “Those fires at the mansion just seemed to go on forever,” contributed Gallowglass. “I didn’t know who else to call about this, Dane,” the Archbishop admitted. “We have to discover what caused the death of my dear colleague Alfred Cheyney, and why it happened. Look at this place! Look at him!” For the first time the scene of crime investigators moved aside and Dane saw the corpse. It too was a grotesque sculpture of bone, destroyed from within as its own skeleton had twisted and burst free from its body. Long tangled new spines stabbed out from beneath the Canon’s bloody carcass. Bone had pushed out through his face and chest. Dane reached for his cellphone and dialled a number. “I know who to call,” he admitted. But Dr Stephen Strange’s number was unavailable. “Ah,” sighed Dane. He looked at the shattered stone, the burnt books, the grotesque bone carvings, the burst scholar, and he surrendered to fate. “Then I know who else to call.” He thumbed another number into his phone and added, “God help me.” There was a pause as his call was connected, and then he took a deep breath and said, “Crystal? I need you.” The Galeria Zwiasku auction house was one of the less well known establishments off Vienna’s Kärntner Ring, because it specialised. As the time for the latest sale approached a number of well dressed men and women in power-business suits arrived in limousines to attend. But along with them were other men in long trenchcoats and dark glasses, some of them with mysterious bulges under their overcoats. It was all very discrete, and only those with the house’s engraved invitation got past the footmen on the door. Victor Shade handed his card to the receptionist and stepped through the airport-style security arch before entering the baroque interior of the gallery. The device discerned no concealed weaponry, no hidden metal, no genetic abnormalities. It didn’t alert security to the plastic skin and synthetic organs of the world’s most sophisticated synthezoid. Shade chose a seat by the outer aisle near the back, where he could watch the arrivals and match them with the Interpol database he was currently linked into. Some were easy. The small man with a twitch in the pinstripe was buyer for Justine Hammer. The blonde twins sitting intimately entwined with each other had to be Fenris. The pale balding man in the store-ready grey suit was representing AIM. The woman in the green designer original was a HYDRA section leader. The intense fellow with the walrus moustaches was the Master of Art for the Kingdom of Latveria. By the time the auction was set to start Shade had identified over half the attendees, from Mister Little to the Grey Gargoyle. But he was far more interested in exhibit nine. This was a sale of rare exotic items not customarily available or strictly legal. There was an anti-gravity drive from a Skrull saucer, a kilo of antarctic anti-metal, the shell of a Brood drone, a DNA sample from Killgrave the Controller. Shade noted the patterns of bidding, and who was interested in what. He bided his time until the documents that formed lot nine came up. “Something of an oddity here,” the auctioneer admitted. “These classified US Government notes date from the close of world war two and have been sealed in the Pentagon for the last sixty years. They were part of the information extracted by the Red Skull during his recent masquerade as Secretary of Defence Dell Rusk, and were retrieved unopened after his fall. They were diverted from custody and are offered here today sight unseen. Will anybody venture fifty thousand for then?” Bidding was sporadic, but in the end the HYDRA woman acquired the documents for $322,000. Victor Shade watched until the auction’s end, and as the various purchasers were guided away to conduct their transactions he glided after the Section Chief and her unctuous hosts, ignoring the security precautions intended to keep out intruders. He flicked on a real-time connection to the Technological Jungle beneath the capital of the African nation-state that was sponsoring his trip and reported. “It appears as if Struker’s agent has acquired the documents, T’Challa. I shall pursue and determine whether your suspicions are founded, and whether somebody is planning the murder of every superhero on the planet.” Crystalia Amaquelin Maximoff was a petite copper-headed beauty with a fresh heart-shaped face, and when she moved it was as if she was walking on air. The glowering man with the folded arms and swept-back silver hair behind her didn’t move at all, just fixed his angry gaze on Dane Whitman and never turned aside. “Thanks for coming,” the Black Knight told his two former comrades. “Especially you Pietro. You didn’t need to come.” “I think I did,” answered Quicksilver curtly. “I am caring for my wife.” He emphasised the word, and placed a protective hand on Crystal’s shoulder. “Good. Great,” answered Dane. He wasn’t going to get into competitions with Pietro Maximoff again over the lovely elemental whose advice he needed, Dane told himself. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I need an expert opinion.” “You said it was urgent,” Crystal agreed. “That’s why I got here via the Pietro express.” The Black Knight blinked. “Excuse me? Are you saying that Quicksilver ran you here? Between continents?” “My speed and range have been increased considerably since last we worked closely, Dane Whitman,” Quicksilver answered. “Good,” the Knight said again. “Well done.” It was an awkward reunion. Crystal and Dane had both served as Avengers during a time when the Inhuman princess was estranged from her husband, and Pietro was well aware of the attraction between the swashbuckling scientist and his own wayward wife. But there was business at hand. Dane gestured for his former team-mates to follow him down into the aumbrey “Crystal, I’m afraid this is a bit of a gory scene. They’ve moved the body but still…” “I’ve fought beside my family in wars,” the elemental pointed out, “I saw Kree-Lar after the Nega Bomb. And you were with me when we entered the Grim Reaper’s hell dimension.” Quicksilver glowered more. “Still,” Dane told her, “This isn’t nice.” Crystal ducked low under a ribbon of bone and looked around the room in grim fascination. “It’s not nice,” she agreed. Pietro followed them into the barrel-roofed chamber. “What could cause this macabre devastation?” he wondered. Crystal brushed her fingers over the broken stone, over the scorched books, over the gristly bone itself. “Something malignant,” she shuddered. “Something that controls bone. Dwells in it I think.” “Be cautious,” Quicksilver warned her. “This smacks of the occult, and we are ill-prepared to protect ourselves against it.” “Still no word from Wanda then?” Dane ventured. Pietro turned upon him faster than he could see. “You will speak no word of my sister!” he hissed. “None!” “Okay,” Dane backed off. “Look, I know it’s you I’m talking to, but… chill out a little, can’t you?” “There was an intelligence behind this,” Crystal interrupted. Her Inhuman genetic gifts were around the control of the four primal elements, and she had a sensitivity to their use and abuse. “Behind that broken grave marker in the wall, there was – there is – a skeleton long entombed. Somehow the… whatever it was got into it, and its bones began to twist and grow.” Dane shone his torch into the collapsed alcove. The Archbishop’s prohibition against electrical light had already been voided by the police forensics team. A dozen thick strands of bone merged into a clotted nexus that might once have been a conventional corpse. “It pressed through the stone, shattered it,” Crystal sensed. “It was growing so fast, so urgently, pushed by something dark and horrible.” “Be calm, my wife,” Quicksilver urged her. “Whatever evil did this is gone now. It did its murder and left.” Dane looked around the gloomy ruined library and hoped that was so. “It was aimed at the man,” Crystal went on. She pointed to the wrecked desk and the shattered lamp. “It wanted the man, and what he was reading. The bones pierced him, so sharp…” “And then whatever was in them jumped,” Dane realised. “Transferred from the old corpse it was mutating into Canon Cheyney’s own skeleton. That’s it. That’s why he was so disfigured.” “That is… most unpleasant,” Quicksilver admitted. “Is there a supervillain with powers of this kind?” “I don’t know where it went then,” Crystal admitted. “I can’t really read bone, only the stone and the fire.” There was a rattling behind them, and they realised the only exit to the aumbrey was now completely sealed with yellow-white osseous growths. “It didn’t go anywhere,” the Black Knight realised. “It’s still here!” The HYDRA Section Chief was led from the ornate coffered hallway into an elaborate gilded room, where mundane details such as transactions between discreet numbered Swiss accounts could be discussed in a civilised atmosphere. Victor Shade checked that there was nobody in the hall, directed the video monitor to randomly switch to a different view of another part of the gallery, and faded to transparency. He gently ghosted himself into the thick stone wall, passing through solid matter like the Vision they had once called him. He didn’t call himself the Vision now. That name belonged to his time when he’d been a member of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, the Avengers, defending the world despite the personal cost. And first the world had hated him for being an artificial being, and then it had hated him for loving a human woman, and this it had conspired to dismantle him to a mindless robot. He had stood by unable to help as his children were destroyed, his wife driven insane. But even then he had served, until the moment King T’Challa of the Wakandas has hinted at the truth. Unwilling to believe, he had agreed to the undercover mission, letting the Black Panther substitute a Life Model Decoy robot to fill his place with the Avengers. That mindless automaton had fought beside the team for weeks, months, and none of those he called friends and team-mates had noticed the difference. Then it was destroyed, and few of his team-mates seemed to care. So Victor Shade continued his mission, and now he was alone. He pressed his intangible face forward, silently surfacing just an inch out of the wall to witness what was happening in the conference room. The Section Leader and her hosts were all dead, and lot number nine was gone. The forest of bones tangled and twisted, growing like a thing alive. It knotted itself forwards, sharp spear-point tips driving its three victims backwards away from the door. “What is it?” Quicksilver demanded, his voice tense and shaken. No speed could get him or his wife past the bone thorns of that dense maze. “We found out too much,” realised Crystal. “It can’t let us get away.” She spread one palm before her and a flare of fire engulfed the nearest feelers; but bone charred slowly and a dozen more tendrils quested out to replace those seared to nothing. Dane Whitman reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a stubby metal cylinder. He thumbed a switch and a blade of coherent force seared out. “Still suffering from Jedi envy, then,” Crystal observed, trying to stay calm as the clacking bone edges approached. The Black Knight swung his blade and sliced a swathe of bone from the mass. It clattered to the floor but began to grow anew, spawning more sharp tendrils to menace the trapped trio. “Don’t let these things scratch you,” Pietro warned urgently. “Remember what happened to the scholar here!” Dane slashed again, trying to clear a path to freedom. “I can’t cut through it fast enough!” he warned. “It keeps growing back!” “Speed,” Quicksilver pointed out, holding his hand imperiously to be given the photonic sword, “happens to be my forte.” The Black Knight reluctantly gave up his only weapon and let the speedster mutant scythe into the mass of bone. “Be careful!” Crystal shrieked as the osseous tendrils curved in behind her husband. “Watch out!” Dane called, grabbing Crystal into his arms as the bone structures closed in on them too, gaining in strength and speed. He knew then that Pietro wasn’t going to get them out. He knew that he was going to die here. They were all going to die here. Crystal was going to die here. “No,” the Black Knight growled his eyes narrowing to angry flint chips. “Not so!” The warrior felt the fury come upon him, cold and deadly. Dane swung out, carving left and right by blind instinct, swathing through the bone jungle, hacking it to fragments. In his mind he was once again back in the Crusades, carving the heathen, in the Otherworld, battling demon-goblins, in Avalon aginst the seething Formorian hordes. And the bones seemed to retreat before him. Then Pietro had the way clear, and he was whizzing Crystal free and away. Dane raced after them, slamming the aumbrey’s metal vault door shut to contain the rattling menace within. It was only then that he realised he had cut his way free and saw he was holding the Ebony Blade in his hand. Continued… Footnotes for the Baffled Neophyte: The Black Knight (Dane Whitman) is descendant of a line of warriors linked to the Ebony Blade, a supernatural sword forged by Merlin from a mysterious meteor. The Ebony Blade has some unpleasant aspects such as draining life-force from its victims and cursing its owner for shedding blood. Most recently it possessed Dane’s friend, transforming him to the Bloodwraith that stalked the devastated ruins of an exterminated European nation . Dane used his scientific abilities to craft himself a non-lethal “neural sabre”, then later gained a “sword of light” and “shield of night” from “the Lady of the Lake”. This story reveals that those gifts have somehow vanished. Quicksilver (Pietro Maximoff) is a mutant gifted with immense speed that has recently been significantly increased. He and his sister Wanda are the children of mutant terrorist Magneto but were raised by gypsies by their foster-father Django Maximoff. Recently Wanda – the Scarlet Witch – lost control of her magics and precipitated the crisis that shattered the Avengers. She was rendered mindless, last seen being cared for by Magneto. Pietro has a troubled marriage with Crystal and is father to Luna. Crystal (Princess Crystalia Amaquelin Maximoff) is an Inhuman, one of the genetically-modified offshoot nation of hidden superhumans. Her Inhuman gift is to control the four classical elements. Her marriage to Quicksilver has been a difficult one, leading to her infidelity with a human, her separation from her husband, and her subsequent romance with Dane Whitman. Crystal and Pietro have recently reconciled and seek to offer a stable home for their five-year old daughter. The Vision (Victor Shade) is a synthezoid, an android built in 1939 to replicate the biological functions of a human, using technology not available at the time. The deactivated android was redesigned at the behest of robot villain Ultron to use as a weapon against the Avengers, gaining density-changing powers and drawing energy via a forehead solar gem, but broke his programming and became a long-serving mainstay of the team. He later fell in love and married the Scarlet Witch, but their relationship was sundered when he was temporarily mind-wiped and his twin children with Wanda Maximoff were revealed to be unreal. The Vision was apparently destroyed during the events leading to the disbanding of the Avengers, as explained in our text here. The Black Panther (King T’Challa) is the hereditary ruler of the African nation-state of Wakanda, wearer of the sacred mantle of the Panther-Cult. He possessed enhances senses, reflexes, and other physical abilities from consumption of a sacred heart-shaped herb. Wakanda is a strange mix of the primitive and high-tech, a land in transition. T’Challa strives to be a proactive ruler, often initiating Byzantine political schemes to ensure the wellbeing of his subjects. He originally joined the Avengers to assess their threat capacity, but remained because he valued their fellowship. |
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