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Post By IW Mon Dec 13, 2004 at 08:16:19 am EST |
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Avengers: Underground #3 | |
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| Previously: Two different murder investigations, one of a mediaeval scholar in York, England and one of auction house staff in Vienna, Austria, are both linked by the same macabre bone-twisting, the work of the sinister Bonewalker. While Quicksilver researches legends about the villain and discovers links with his own origins and the Black Knight conducts analysis on fragments of affected bone and uncovers links with Henry (Ant-Man) Pym’s size-changing particles, Crystal learns of correspondence between the murdered academic Cheyney and Baroness Astrid Mordo. But as she hurries back to tell Dane (Black Knight) Whitman of this she too falls prey to the Bonewalker! This story is 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 #3 “Terrifying, isn’t it?” a voice asked inside Crystal’s head. “That knowledge that your own skeleton is no longer yours, to feel your bones move independent of the muscles that guide them? Try not to resist, because I can certainly exert enough force to shred your tendons if you do. Your body will move as well for me dead as alive, as this carriage driver has demonstrated.” The princess of the Inhumans sat in the back seat of the taxi and was more terrified than at any time in her young, terrifying life. “You will die eventually, of course. You and your companions have stumbled into things that are forbidden to know, and people are taking that very seriously. So seriously that I have been awoken to deal with it.” “You murdered the Canon,” Crystal accused, thinking rather than speaking since her jaw would not co-operate. “And others. Many others,” boasted the Bonewalker. “But I will ask the questions, mortal of flesh.” “I won’t tell you anything.” “No? Not when I extend talons of your own bone through your most sensitive nerve clusters? When I have your eye-sockets grow shut and send a spike to puncture each of your eyeballs? I can leave you blind, deaf, dumb, maimed so grotesquely that you will never move again.” Crystal shuddered and clung on to her courage. “No matter what.” “I’m keen to try,” the Bonewalker confided. “I have always enjoyed torturing pretty women, even back before my little mishap with the Darkhold. But for now you are more useful to me as bait for the one who wields the Ebony Sword. That was a surprise.” “Dane destroyed your trap,” Crystal declared loyally. “He… you recognised the Ebony Blade?” “It killed me when I was mortal,” replied the Bonewalker. “I shall not quickly forget it.” Crystal found herself being forced out of the cab. “Make any noise to warn of your possession and I shall puncture your larynx,” her enemy warned. It was a short walk from where the taxi was illegally parked to the ivy-covered Particle Physics building. The Bonewalker didn’t have to ask for directions. He could already feel where the Ebony Blade was. Now all he had to do was kill the man who carried it. Wolfgang Strucker sat reading a Times newspaper and sipping his coffee outside a small café across the road from the Eglise St-Michel. He didn’t like the coffee, he despised the heat in Gabon’s capital city of Libreville, and he wasn’t in a good mood. When he saw the man he was meeting walking down the road looking cool and collected in a black suit and dark shades he was even less happy. T’Challa, King of the Wakandas, slid into the chair opposite him and ordered a black coffee in perfect French. “Well?” Struker demanded, folding his paper and glaring at the Black Panther. “Why have you called me to meet with you in this godforsaken place, Avenger?” “You wouldn’t have met anywhere that had an extradition treaty with the US,” T’Challa pointed out to the head of the right-wing terrorist group HYDRA. “And there are things we must discuss.” He sipped his coffee, and gave no indication that he had previously checked its composition with the Kimoyo Card in his pocket. “As for the Avengers, I am not currently affiliated with that team.” “Unless you’ve reconsidered your unwise position on not selling your vibranium stocks I see little for us to discuss.” The Panther laid the autopsy report on Soon Lo Choi on the table. “We are both interested in the murder of your Section Leader,” he suggested. Struker snorted. “I am not interested in committing suicide today, Panther. Had I understood the nature of the lot for which I was bidding I would never have sought it.” “And now you know its nature?” “Let’s say I’ve had it drawn to my attention how unwise it might be for HYDRA to pursues this particular matter. My long term goals will be better achieved by leaving others to unwisely chase that chimera.” Von Struker looked at T’Challa. “You, for example. Tell me, if you die unexpectedly what are the arrangements for succession in Wakanda? I’ve never been terribly clear on that.” “So you’ve been scared off the stolen package,” the Panther noted. “By whom?” “By people who can help me in exchange for my forbearance, or harm me if I persist in asking dangerous questions,” the Supreme HYDRA warned. “I can’t get myself killed if you don’t give me some kind of lead,” T’Challa pointed out. Wolfang Struker considered that. “There were a number of your old foes who could have told you,” he answered at last, rising and folding his paper under his arm. “But eleven of them are silent now, and the twelfth is unlikely to see you. Good day, Avenger.” He walked away sticking T’Challa with the bill. “Crystal, you’ve got to see this!” Dane called enthusiastically as the Inhuman entered the particle analysis lab. “I’ve isolated the medium through which those bones grow and distend so rapidly, and its exactly the same way that Hank Pym gains extra mass when he…” Crystal stood silently inside the doorway, her throat constricted, but Dane realised that tears were streaming down her cheeks. “Crys, what’s wrong?” he demanded, dropping the clipboard and scanner he’d been waving and rushing over to the lady. Crystal seemed to slump forward into his arms, wrapping her own arms around his neck. “Crystal? What is… I don’t know if this is…” A sharp tine of bone jabbed from Crystal’s finger into his spine; and then the Bonewalker was in him too. “I’m sorry Dane,” the Inhuman princess sobbed, able to speak again now but not move. “It’s the Bonewalker. He’s in us.” “I knew she was your weakness,” the villain crowed in their minds. “I saw the way you protected her in the Minster vault. You love her!” “No!” Dane shouted, although his jaw wouldn’t hinge to accommodate his speech. Suddenly the Ebony Blade was there in his palm, but his fingers wouldn’t close and it clattered uselessly to the floor. “You have no idea how long I’ve yearned for this moment,” the Bonewalker confided in Dane Whitman. “Ever since my original deformities earned me death at the hands of Sir Percy of Scandia I’ve wanted to take my vengeance on the Black Knight.” He twisted Dane and Crystal round cruelly and laughed in their minds. “And now I can.” It was a meeting in shadow, somewhere on the rooftops in eastern Berlin. “Can I trust you?” asked the Black Panther. “No. But you can trust my information.” “Very well. What was in Lot Nine that caused such a strong reaction to the possibility of it being discovered?” “It was minutes, of meetings that never happened in the final years of the Great Patriotic War.” “About sanctuary for war criminals in exchange for technology?” T’Challa’s informant snorted. “That’s old news. No, these were rather more dangerous, and rather more apposite to the current day, my friend.” “Then what were they?” the Panther persisted. “Do you remember what happened when the Avengers vanished during the Onslaught and were assumed dead?” “Of course. It was a difficult time,” the Panther admitted. “Nothing made any sense. We weren’t even certain who was lost and who was still around.” “And the Avengers reformed, of course. Quicksilver, Hercules, Living Lightning and the others, because once an Avenger, always an Avenger, yes?” “That’s what we used to say,” conceded the king of the Wakandas. “And then… nothing. The team was quietly dissolved, went their separate ways. The Mansion was turned over to SHIELD and Earth’s Mightiest Heroes were no more!” “When Captain America returned they reformed,” the Panther pointed out. “Nobody expected Steve to return. Nobody expected the Avengers to come back. They never should have.” “What do you mean?” “If the Avengers had disbanded then they wouldn’t have had to be dismantled a second time, more violently still. Or as many times as it takes. T’Challa, what do you think those meetings were about in 1945?” The Black Panther considered. “Did they concern the Invaders? The All-Winners’ Squad? The Liberty Legion?” “Tell me this, T’Challa… five years after the war, of all the heroes who had served to fight the Axis, how many were still publicly active? And how many were dead, or insane, or de-powered, or lost, or gone? How many?” The Panther frowned. “You hinted at this before, when you set me on this quest.” “The minutes detail how the superheroes of the 40s were systematically eliminated, T’Challa. Shut down, hard. Just like they’re doing again right now with the heroes of today.” “They?” noted the Black Panther. “And who is this they?” “If I knew I’d be too frightened to tell you. I only came to you because it’ll take extreme measures and the resources only a nation can command to uncover the truth here, and even now I fear I may have set you to your death.” The Black Widow laid a hand on the Panther’s chest. “Be careful, my friend. You have never faced a deadlier foe than this.” Then there was a blur of colour as Quicksilver sped back from his mission and discovered his wife locked in the arms of the Black Knight. Again. “Whitman!” Pietro Maximoff snarled and slammed into Dane at high speed. The Knight and Crystal, locked together, tumbled onto the floor. Then both of them levitated to hang immobile in the centre of the room. “What?” demanded Quicksilver, skidding to a halt. Crystal could manipulate winds to lift herself but the air here was still. “What is this?” “This is the Bonewalker,” came an old, cruel voice in his head. “I am in your wife and her lover. I can do whatever I wish with them.” He illustrated by jolting Crystal and Dane’s pelvises back and forth in crude mockery of copulation. “I can disfigure them or kill them.” “Don’t,” begged Pietro. “What do you want?” “It’s very simple,” the Bonewalker replied. “Just pick up the Ebony Blade there and kill this Black Knight with it.” Quicksilver hesitated. “And then you will release my wife?” “I promise.” “Then I shall.” “Noo!” Crystal screamed. “Pietro, you can’t! You mustn’t.” And suddenly the winds were there. The room shook as the ground beneath it trembled, and Crystal and the Black Knight were tumbled across the floor as the Bonewalker’s levitation failed. “What is this?” demanded the horror, who had no knowledge of Crystal’s Inhuman elemental gifts, not that she could use them without any movement whatsoever. Quicksilver moved faster than the eye could see, separating his wife from the fallen Knight, hurling a handful of dust into her face. She coughed and choked and then squirmed as the Bonewalker screamed and departed from her. “What?” the horror hissed, scrambling the Black Knight up and preparing to burst from his flesh into another forest of deadly osseous thorns. “What was that?” “A little piece of home,” Quicksilver told him, whipping Crystal to the other side of the still shaking room. “Dirt from Wundagore Mountain, where you were buried and bound. I picked it up on my way back. I thought it might have some effect.” Before the Bonewalker could react the mutant speedster was in close again, opening his other fist to hurl more of the dirt into the Black Knight’s face. The Bonewalker was cast out again, and took refuge in the osseous fragment that Dane had been examining. The shard twisted and grew rapidly, forming into a complicated ribbed tangle of bony limbs and flailing spines. Crystal unleashed all her horror and terror into one blast of flame that seared a three foot hole in the monster of bone. It still kept coming. Tendrils of bone dug into floors and walls, starting to collapse the building. The long white feelers formed a cage around the room, preventing Quicksilver from dragging Crystal to freedom. “There is no escape,” the Bonewalker promised them. “We do not wish to escape, villain!” Crystal called up the earth, great waves of pounding rock to smash through the puny bone prison that surrounded them. Her copper hair whipped behind her as she unleashed her power, driving at the Bonewalker in raging surges. The Black Knight hesitated only a moment before picking up his Ebony Blade. It felt right to hold the cold hilt in his fist. That seemed to drive the Bonewalker over the edge. The Particle Physics building exploded in a confusion of calcium growths, as tree-sized pillars of bone twisted and replicated to crush the heroes that resisted it. A toppling wall caught Pietro and Crystal unawares, stunning them both and leaving them pinned as the bone-strands closed on them. Dane stood over their bodies, striking with lightning precision with the weapon that felt like part of him, but it was only a matter of time before he faltered. “You will die, Black Knight!,” screamed the Bonewalker in his head. “Die! Die! Die! Give me back my soul!” Victor Shade ghosted up through the shattered building and became solid behind the main nexus of the Bonewalker’s structure. He formed a fist with the density of titanium, then made it harder. Then he punched into the osseous monster before him with bone-shattering force. The Bonewalker acted by instinct, hammering a dozen shards of bone into the newcomer. All but one of them broke on Victor’s flesh. One passed insubstantially through him until it found the bone inside. The Bonewalker hissed in triumph as it leaped into the fragment beneath this enemy’s skin. But then he found out some very strange things. This was not part of Victor Shade’s skeleton, for that was a thing of complex polycarbides and osmium steel. This was a shard from the body of murdered security guard Hugo Muller. And it was encased now in super-dense matter that all his growth-abilities could not penetrate. And then the scrambling frequency was released, the one that confused the Pym Particles used to draw growth matter from the Kosmos dimension, the one specifically tuned to the resonance Dane Whitman’s computers had discerned earlier. It was the one that left the Bonewalker with nowhere to go but that small, captured fragment contained within an implacable Vision. Dane looked up in amazement to find the bone structures around him crumbling. He didn’t recognise the trenchcoated man who had walked into save him. “Beware,” said Victor Shade, “this isn’t over yet.” Crystal shifted painfully beneath the rubble. “Ouch,” she complained. “I’d forgotten how painful supervillains were.” She instinctively reached out and too control of the fires and crumbling stonework around her. Then she sensed the trouble. “Oh no!” And then the entire Particle Physics building exploded as the gas main ignited. Inspector Gallowglass couldn’t get into the red-hot rubble for twelve hours after the fire was doused, and it took his diggers another two hours to get through the charred remains of the building to find the missing people. But then the three corpses were found, one of them still tightly gripping a shining black sword. The press went into a feeding frenzy at the news that three more Avengers were dead. Continued… Footnotes for the Bereaved Fan: The Darkhold, or the Book of Sins, is a volume of parchments transcribed eons ago by the demonic Elder God, to serve as his touchstone with the Earthly dimension. Since Atlantean times it has brought many curses to the world, including creating Varnae, the first vampire. It was first bound in book form by Morgana le Fey shortly before it corrupted Mordred the Mystic to be its servant. It was later sought or held by Cagliostro and Dracula, and cursed the Rusoff family to become werewolves by night. A full history of the dark volume and the trouble it has caused can be found at The Marvel Directory: The Darkhold. Baron Wolfgang von Struker was a Nazi serving Hitler during the second World War and a recurring foe of Nick Fury and his Howling Commandos. Receiving age-retarding treatments similar to those Fury got, Strucker survived the war and re-formed many of the escaped Nazis as the terrorist agency HYDRA. Struker is currently the Supreme Leader of this organisation. He’s not a nice man. Again, more details at The Marvel Directory: Baron Struker. The Black Widow (Natalia Alianovna Romanova, a.k.a. Natasha Romanoff) is a former Soviet spy who now works freelance for SHIELD (the Strategic Hazard, International Espionage and Logistics Directorate). She was Chairwoman of the Avengers for a lengthy period of time, up to the Onslaught “event” that ended the first volume of the series with #403. The Widow’s inexplicable closure of the team thereafter was partially addressed in Avengers Annual 2001. More on Natasha also at The Marvel Directory: Black Widow. The Widow’s History Lesson: The Invaders were a wartime superhero unit based around Captain America, the Sub-Mariner, and the original Human Torch. The team later became the All-Winners Squadron. The Liberty Legion was an informal association of homefront heroes. At the end of the war many of these superhumans dropped out of sight. Captain America was lost in the Arctic, the Sub-Mariner became amnesiac after a battle with the telepath Destiny, the Human Torch was deactivated (and later became the Vision), and many other heroes retired, died, or went mad. Suspicious, eh? The Bonewalker hasn’t appeared anywhere before, but we now know of him that he encountered the original Black Knight, Sir Percy of Scandia, died on the Ebony Blade, and was buried and bound beneath Wundagore mountain in Transia. His encounter with the Darkhold or the Ebony Blade seems somehow responsible for his undead condition and his ability to possess and twist bone. |
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