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Post By IW Sat Jan 22, 2005 at 06:17:50 am EST |
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Avengers: Underground #6 | |
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| Previously: To investigate a plot rumoured to be aimed at wiping out all superheroes and hints that previous generations may have also been eliminated, the Black Panther (King T'Challa of the Wakandas) has gathered a small team of his fellow former Avengers to search for the truth. Meanwhile the Panther sought out old Avengers adversary Libra, whose sensitivity to cosmic balance may give him special insights into the secrets T'Challa seeks. This story is part of a collection of fan-fiction stories assembled by Ozbot at Avengers Anew. Previous chapters can be found at on the Avengers: Underground Archive Page. The principal characters in this story at the property of Marvel Comics, and this isn’t a challenge to their legal rights. Avengers: Underground #6 Darren Bentley looked around the black-draped room with some disdain. “What is this?” he demanded. “A summit meeting or a séance?” Big Jack Kievano laid a hand on his rash Californian colleague’s shoulder. “Relax,” he advised in his Texan twang. “Van Lunt’s eccentric but he knows what he’s doin’.” “He’s creeping me out is what he’s doing,” suggested Elaine McLaughlin, prospective mayor of Denver. “I know he’s gotten into this astronomy stuff big time, but…” “Astrology,” Gustaf Brandt interrupted her. He was sat in the corner in a dark suit and shades, listening to the others as they arrived. “The study of the effects of stellar movements on the destiny of mortals. Astronomy is telescopes. Astrology is fate.” “Astrology is what will make us the richest and most powerful people in this nation,” announced Cornelius van Lunt, appearing from behind a silver-embroidered curtain with his personal astrologer at his shoulder. The bulky businessman stood before his eleven guests and spanned his stocky arms out. “It is what will make the cartel we form today the most effective criminal organisation in the world.” Around the room the men (and one woman) stared at him with hostility, scepticism, interest, or tolerance depending on their character; just as their star signs dictated they would, van Lunt observed. But he saw their faces change as he laid the shining golden ankh on the table before them: the Zodiac Key that would change their fortunes forever. Gustaf Brandt glimpsed over his shoulder, as if he heard something. “We’d better go,” Libra told the Black Panther as they stood unseen amidst the formation of the Zodiac crime cartel. “Even back in this time my perceptions were quite sharp. It would complicate things considerably if I detected my future self in the room.” T’Challa and the master of balance turned aside, leaving van Lunt to forge the criminal conspiracy that would plague SHIELD and the Avengers for years, that would one day almost eliminate one twelfth of the population of New York as a sign of their power. “Who was the thirteenth man?” T’Challa asked as they walked away through time and space. “The astrologer in the robes?” “He was the reason van Lunt made his fortune in the first place,” Libra replied. “He’s one of the Brotherhood of the Ankh.” “The extraplanar beings who keep sending the Zodiac Key to earth so it can generate and feed on conflict,” T’Challa recalled. “Most recently the Avengers had to prevent a new Zodiac from stealing whole cities away.” “There are always new Zodiacs,” Libra replied. “After all, it’s a celestial cycle.” His winding timespace track briefly passed through a series of bizarre montages. The original Zodiac cartel lay slaughtered at the feet of android replacements led by Jake Fury as Scorpio. A turn later and that robot group was following Quicksilver as he led them to attack the Avengers. Another twist and a new would-be Zodiac was plunging New York into blackout, struggling to fulfil their First Sign agenda and accomplish what their forebears could not. Yet another pace took the Panther and Libra past the bio-engineered Zodiac group that had struggled with Alpha Flight at the behest of the mysterious Ecliptic. “I was told that some of the Avengers’ former foes could explain a secret to me,” T’Challa noted. “That eleven of them were dead and the twelfth would not see me.” “And I am blind,” Gustav Brandt agreed. “Very witty.” “My informant was frightened, and that is something I am not used to from that person.” “Depending on what secret you’re chasing your informant may have been wise.” The Panther looked back at the incarnations of the Zodiac, stretched out on that strange path behind him. “The trail seems to go back before van Lunt became Taurus of the Zodiac.” “Of course it does. There have been Zodiacs throughout history, whenever plotters have been required to foment change.” “The Brotherhood of the Ankh have been quite busy.” Libra snorted derisively. “Tools,” he replied. “Mere tools. The Zodiac Key is a shiny, sparkly toy to keep would-be conquerors amused, and the Brotherhood nothing but its maintenance crew. To say they are behind the procession of the Zodiac is like saying a wristwatch makes time go forward.” The Panther peered from the dark path Libra trod. He could barely perceive smoky rooms and furtive men, always plotting. “So who is behind the Zodiac really?” he asked. “And what do they want?” “The true Zodiac cartel is rather older than your Avengers, and it doesn’t waste its time with Star Cannons that can kill people by their birthdays,” Libra answered. “It counts down until certain events which as destined to happen come to pass, and it makes preparations in due season.” “Does that include wiping out generations of superheroes?” King T’Challa accused. Gustav Brandt halted in his time-twisting perambulation. “Yes,” he admitted with some surprise. “So you really have come to uncover the secret.” “I know there’s a plot to eliminate Earth’s mightiest heroes,” the Panther replied. “And that this has happened before, most recently in 1945 when a generation of metahumans were shut down. Now I need to know by whom, and why.” Libra turned again, and suddenly they were in a bunker of World War Two vintage, where a man in a dark trenchcoat was overseeing workers that lowered the android Human Torch into a vat of cement. A step further on and the same man was leading a dazed and vacant-faced Sub-Mariner into a Bowery flop-house. Another pace and the same stranger was watching as a man in the costume of Captain America was led from the bedside of an injured boy in a Bucky mask by a woman with beautiful golden hair. These were more than visions. T’Challa’s enhanced senses could smell the plastic and dried blood beneath the trenchcoated stranger’s clothes. “Here’s the villain of the piece that was used to eliminate the last generation,” Libra answered on their next twist along destiny’s path. To their left there was a glimpse of Baron Struker and his renegade Nazis, the criminals who would soon become HYDRA, as they massacred every member of the Tibetan community that had empowered the Thin Man. “Unless you’re talking about the Lost Generation, of course, that were wiped out in a single day.” T’Challa was confused for a moment, appalled by the rapine and slaughter he couldn’t prevent. “This is a Lost Generation?” For a moment the panther glimpsed a blurred other path, twisting away with events and people he wasn’t familiar with. Then it blinked out. “That’s a timeline where a whole new superhero team served your world for three decades, much longer than your Avengers have. But nobody thinks of them now, references them, remembers them much. They too were culled, in their way, and few echoes remain of them.” As soon as Libra mentioned the First Line T'Challa recalled them. How has he ever forgotten? How could the world forget what they had done, what they had suffered? "Who has so obscured these heroes…" the King of the Wakandas wondered. A scream from one of the women the Nazis were abusing before slaughtering distracted him. For a moment his body shifted to pounce. Libra restrained him. "You can't interfere with what you witness." He pointed to the horrors of the Himalayan genocide. “This is Kalahia, where Dr Bruce Dickson learned to weave between physical dimensions and become a superhero,” Libra snorted. “It’s not important, except that its destruction drove Thin Man insane.” He pointed to the same trenchcoated figure watching Struker’s men geld their male captives even as the women were being raped. “That’s why he brought them here.” The Panther crouched low so he could peer under the stranger’s hat. What little face showed above a muffled scarf was a gory red pulp of exposed nerves covered by a transparent seal. “They call him the Dissected Man,” Libra continued. “Because he was.” “What has he to do with the Bonewalker?” T’Challa asked. “Various members of the Zodiac like to retain agents of distinction,” Libra suggested. “The Dissected Man and the Bonewalker are two of them.” The Panther reluctantly pulled himself away from the gory wreck to follow as his guide strode on. “Who are these true Zodiac, then?” he asked. “What is their power, and what are their motives?” “Like all cartels they have differing objectives but much common cause,” Libra answered. “And all seek to benefit from the event they have foreseen coming. For that reason they need to eliminate the Earth’s superhuman population, and especially the most prominent members thereof.” The Panther turned quickly as the path took them past the last struggle against Onslaught, then the recent struggle with the Scarlet Witch. “Wanda’s madness was part of the plot to eliminate the superhuman community?” T’Challa surmised. “Those events served a purpose, yes,” agreed Brandt. “Although it is proving somewhat difficult to drown out the call to heroism.” For a moment the path looped into the near future, and the Panther glimpsed Hawkeye the Marksman surrounded by another new team of would-be Avengers. “If they survive they too will have to be put down hard before long,” Libra noted impassively. “Why now?” the Panther asked. “Why the sudden need to eliminate heroes in the 40’s and again today?” The path ended in a grey barrier cutting across the strange trackways the master of balance had been threading. “This is the end of the road,” Libra replied. “I can’t take you any further.” “Maintaining the balance?” the Black Panther suggested. “Revealing just enough to keep me interested, and so continue the struggle?” “If you wish,” shrugged the blind man. “And how do you know so much about them?” the king of the Wakandas challenged. “These events? What relationship do you have to this ‘true’ Zodiac? Are you one of them?” “As I said,” Libra answered, turning away from the hero he guided. “Various members of the cartel select agents. You can probably work out whose agent I am?” He gestured around the void where he had led the Panther. “You were coming far too close, pussycat. You’re here to be taken out of the game.” Sersi considered her options. After due reflection she decided to go with the winter green outfit. Then she turned back to the Eternal master of speed who she'd trussed up just now inside a thick cocoon of titanium steel she'd created weighing around seventy tons. “This is madness,” Makkari warned his fellow Eternal. “You’ll be discorporated for this!” “What’s madness is coming to me with obscure warnings and insulting threats,” Sersi answered, glaring at the youthful messenger. “It’s not like you, Makkari. And when there’s a family intervention Ikaris usually likes to come and be portentous and tedious in person.” Makkari strained against the thick metal entrapping him. As long as Sersi was focussing her will to reinforce the substance he couldn’t use his Eternal abilities to break free. The master of speed had to grant that the wayward matter manipulator had got very good with her transmutation powers. Perhaps there was something to be said for Avengers’ training. “This isn’t a game, Sersi. No joke. You have to let Dane Whitman go. You can’t interfere in what’s happening here.” “You’d better give me a better reason than ‘Thena said so’ then,” Sersi snorted. “I can’t tell you,” Makkari answered. “But if you come home, join with us again in the Uni-Mind, then you’ll understand.” “I thought I was damaged goods?” Sersi pointed out. “Altered by my Proctor-provoked madness so that I was no longer safe to include in the Eternals’ happy little collective consciousness?” She shrugged dismissively. “Since most of our people left for the stars our uni-mind’s been something akin to an Ozark redneck think tank anyway.” Makkari seethed at this dismissal of the most sacred bond between the Eternal peoples. “Why do you think Great Zuras led most of us safe from Earth in the first place?” “I don’t know, Makkari. Apparently I’m not in the club anymore. So why don’t you just explain it? For that matter, what was that crack back at the airport about ‘what I did in the war’? And why should the Eternals care that I want to investigate the murder of my gann josin?” Makkari’s face suddenly shifted to blank neutrality, but his eyes glowed white. “Sersi of the Eternals, you are required to obey this imperative, to conform to the commands of your creators.” he said, broadcasting his message telepathically even as he spoke in a voice unlike anything Sersi had ever heard him use. “Heed now the word of the Celestials! Libra swung round without warning, and his tight-wrapped hands slashed lethal arc at the Black Panther’s body. But T’Challa avoided them, springing back then coming in low, completely unsurprised by his guide’s treachery. He asked no more questions, made no more sound, but rather concentrated like his lethal namesake on a struggle for his life. Gustav Brandt was well versed in many martial arts, even the strange alien forms of the Priests of Pama. He took the offensive, his blindness no handicap in his attempted to kill the Panther; for here between places his inner vision warned him of his enemies moves before T’Challa even thought of them. He concentrated first on pressing the Panther back, aiming at nerve clusters that would disable limbs, testing for the weaknesses in his opponent’s style. There were none. The Black Panther blocked and countered with savage grace, dancing back then plunging in to rake with bright vibranium claws that forced Libra to divert his energies from killing his opponent to protecting his own flesh. Yet those raking talons still scored his flesh more than once. Libra changed tactics suddenly, dropping into a crane stance then a stork kick, then following with the Kree chal-ti manoeuvre to slam a boot into the Panther’s chest. He heard a rib splinter and smiled with savage satisfaction. But T’Challa had encountered men of the Kree before and rolled away hurt but unbeaten to renew his assault. “You’re very good,” Libra told his opponent. “But there’s a confusion growing in your mind, a weakness that will one day kill you. It’s affecting your abilities by less than one percent so far, but I can sense it. A tumour? A lesion?” The Panther didn’t reply, concentrating his efforts to break through Libra’s defence. “If you had lived, I foresee gradual decline, senility, madness, shame, until you become a joke amongst your fellows and a burden to your nation,” the master of balance mocked. “I’m doing you a kindness slaughtering you here, where nobody will ever know what became of you.” The Panther faltered for a moment and Libra took his chance. Too late Brandt realised that his opponent had feigned his weakness. By then the great cat had caught his leg and dislocated his hip. Libra screamed once as he tumbled to the dark ribbon-path, and a second time as the Black Panther produced a flickering energy-dagger and plunged it into his forehead. Then Gustav Brandt realised he was still alive, the crackling blade of force pierced into his brain. King T’Challa loomed over him, the eyes of his ceremonial mask glowing yellow-green in the knife’s reflected light. “You live at my mercy,” the Panther told Libra. Still the master of balance was not defeated. “Without me you will never find the path back to your proper place and time,” he sneered at his conqueror. “There are countless trackways here, and only I can navigate you home.” T’Challa showed him a small tracking device. “I left a homing beacon on the Swordsman’s grave. I’ve been leaving subatomic particles on the trail as we travelled. I can smell my spoor back to Earth.” Libra swallowed, the uncomfortable feeling of the intruding intangible energy dagger amidst his synapses disrupting his equilibrium. One flick of the energy slide on the blade’s hilt and he would be lobotomised. “Ah.” The Panther’s face came lower, and his voice was a feline growl. “You no longer serve the Zodiac,” T’Challa declared. “We shall have an understanding between us, Gustav Brandt. Speak of it to no man…” Continued… Footnotes for the Tormented Traveller: Libra (Gustav Brandt), probably the last survivor of the Zodiac who first menaced the Avengers, went on to perfect his arcane and martial abilities through study and meditation – and possibly with the sponsorship mentioned in this issue. Although blind, Brandt is a very formidable combatant, as witness his battle with T’Challa herein. Amongst Libra’s abilities is the gift of walking between realities, and it is this we see illustrated in his perambulations with the Panther in this story. For more on Gustav Brandt, consult The Unofficial Appendix to the Marvel Universe - Libra. The Formation of the Zodiac (at least the first Zodiac from the Avengers’ point of view) took place sometime before Avengers #72. The original cartel members gathered by Taurus (Cornelius van Lunt) were Aquarius (Darren Bentley), Aries (Marcus Lassiter), Cancer (Jack Kievano), Capricorn (Willard Weir), Gemini (Joshua Link), Leo (Daniel Radford), Libra (Gustav Brandt), Pisces (Noah Perricone), Sagittarius (Harlan Vargas), Scorpio (name unknown, but soon replaced by Jake Fury), and Virgo (Elaine McLaughlin). I found it very hard to find online information about this original Zodiac, but the best was on a gaming site at http://www.angelfire.com/ny/wildthing1/ZOD1.TXT Other incarnations of the Zodiac are described at http://www.comicboards.com/marvelguide/z.htm http://www.hostultra.com/~jarvis/zodiac.html http://www.marvunapp.com/Appendix/zodiacfirstsign.htm and http://www.marvunapp.com/Appendix/zodiacaf.htm The Zodiac Key, a powerful extraplanar artefact with a variety of energy protecting and timespace manipulating powers, is projected into Earth’s dimension by the Keepers of the Ankh, an order dedicated to promoting chaos and conflict. Despite usually appearing as aged robed males, they are not human. After 1945: T’Challa glimpses the “retirement” of a variety of wartime heroes. The Human Torch’s dormancy was arranged after his powers “became unreliable”. He was revived for a brief period in the 1950s then was placed into dormancy again until his revivication by the Mad Thinker to use against the Fantastic Four at the dawn of the modern heroic age. The Sub-Mariner’s memory was wiped in combat with the telepathic villain Destiny, and he spent many years as an amnesiac bum before being discovered and restored by the modern Human Torch (Johnny Storm) in FF#4. The Cap from the flashback isn’t Steve Rogers, but rather one of his replacements. The scene’s from around Captain America #60 (from memory), the issue in which Bucky in seriously injured and Cap’s sometimes-romance interest Betsy Ross joins him as his new partner Golden Girl for the rest of the series’ original run. The Thin Man’s origin is from the golden age comics, but the unpleasant ending to the Kalahians is of course a modern addition, as hinted at in the New Invaders and explicitly detailed in The Marvel Handbook of the Golden Age 2004. For more discourse on the mysteries of the shut-down of the world war two heroes, and to show how long this plot’s been brewing in the author’s mind, readers may wish to read the 1999 article What really Happened at the End of the Golden Age by Ian Watson. After all, it got me the only honorary membership of the Golden Age Marvel Society (GAMS). The Lost Generation were a group of heroes who existed in the gap between the second world war and the start of the modern heroic age. Amongst them was the long-lived First Line superhero team. Virtually the entire group died in battle with a Skrull invasion force a few years before the Fantastic Four's historic rocket flight. The Lost Generation's story was told in a limited series by Byrne and Stern, but it was such a major continuity implant that it hasn't really "stuck", and has never been referenced outside the limited series itself except in one X-Men tale by Byrne himself. I liked the Lost Generation material but couldn't accept it happened in mainstream Marvel continuity because it raised too many plot points that had no answers, and because having a 30-year long first-and-greatest superhero team retconned in undermined both the Fantastic Four and the Avengers' genuine claims at being first and greatest, earned through their stories. So I'd have simply referenced the Lost Generation in this story as a wiped timeline had it not been for Ozbot, who includes one of the characters from that series, the Yankee Clipper, in his current Avengers line-up, and who was keen to retain the history. Hence this compromise, that the characters were around, but that people don't remember them unless prompted. That's another part of our plot, and it doesn't have to be the situation once our plot's done, but for now I hope folks can live with it. The Eternals were created by the massively-powerful Celestial Space Giants, an enigmatic group of beings of cosmic significance who have similarly seeded many other worlds with groups of genetically-advanced Eternals and genetically-morphing Deviants (the Skrulls were on such Deviant group). In recent years the Earth’s Eternal-Deviant conflict reached its climax, and many of the Eternals quit Earth in a combined mental collective, the Uni-Mind, taking the defeated and transformed Deviants with them. The remaining Eternals and the remaining Deviant vestigial communities have an uneasy truce because of the relationship between Thena, Zuras’ replacement as leader of the Earth-based Eternals, and Warlord Kro, war-leader of the Deviants of Lemuria. The story above is the first indication that the Celestians may have programmed certain responses or imperatives into their creations. Sersi was “impaired” as an Eternal by joining a Uni-Mind with an alien race to prevent Earth from conquest, and by the subsequent manipulations of the reality-crossing Procter (an alternate reality Dane Whitman who sought revenge against the Sersis of all timelines). The Panther has used an energy knife to “mark” his enemies before, leaving a trackable energy in their bodies to allow him to find them again. He sustained brain damage in battle with Iron Fist in Black Panther vol 3 #40, and later learned that this unrepairable lesion would eventually kill him. His words to Libra here are reminiscent of those he spoke to the gang-leader he similarly coerced in Black Panther vol 3 #1. |
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