Chapter 5

"The Downhill Rise; The Uphill Drop."

By Flank McLargehuge

Brooklyn:  Nightfall

The final slivers of daylight dog-paddled their way through the heavily-overcast sky before fading completely; and as if finally released from the watchful gaze of an over-protective parent, a flash of lightning split the evening mist, immediately followed by a resounding crash of thunder.  As the rain began, and as it picked up from a light drizzle to a pelting, frigid shower, a lone soldier in a misguided war pulled his armored knees closer to his armored chest, and for the two dozenth time that night:

Asked himself why he was there.(*1)

Why he’d thought a suit borrowed from a retired knight would make him strong enough to joust at dragons disguised as windmills.

Tried to ignore the vague buzzing sensation, the siren’s call in the back of his head, which told  him he was right about something terribly important.

And for the first time, hoped like hell his second-hand costume wouldn’t draw lightning.

A few minutes earlier, a few neighborhoods away.  Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn

She came streaking down out of the sky like a flaming sword dropped out of heaven (hands glowing with white psionic energy, eyes smoldering with rage) into the midst of a drug deal, and her victims leapt back from her in terror.  Lines of light lanced from her fingertips, and half the group scrambling to get away from her collapsed limply to the garbage-covered gravel of the lot.  A chorus of yelps rose from those unassailed, and she allowed them a moment of action before firing again; those that turned to flee she ignored, but those who backed away only to reach for a weapon met a second hail of psionic daggers, and joined the rest of the trash at her feet.

Tandy Bowen crouched (hands held out like weapons, surrounded in deadly white halos, fingers tensed into claws) like an angel of death in the middle of a battle field, savoring the sensation.  It wasn’t often she felt in-control, dominant, powerful.  Paired as she always had been with an angst-ridden living portal to a dimension of darkness, she rarely felt in the ‘spotlight.’(*2)  Perhaps it was time she moved beyond all of it, found herself a new identity outside of Cloak’s shadow, took a new name, a new image.  She liked feeling like a badass. But...

That wasn’t all she felt.  Lost in thought, detached from her body as she felt, she still caught the uncomfortable creeping sensation that she was being watched.

A male voice (like a sock full of jello being put through a clothes ringer?) came from behind her.  “You didn’t kill them, did you?”  Tandy spun, the sheaths of white light around her hands ready to fly out at the merest thought, to find nothing but a high, crumbling brick wall behind her, which had evidently once been part of a building, and the lot she stood in, its front yard.  She raised her hands, casting white search beams across the heavily graffitied but apparently empty surface.  And yet, she could hear fingertips tapping impatiently against brick, seemingly from right in front of her.  As thunder rolled across the sky, Tandy suppressed a shiver.

“Who’s there?” she asked, her voice cracking in the middle of it.  Silently cursing her nerves, she spoke again, more steely:  “What do you want?”  Her light splashed along the wall, glinting off the silver jewelry dangling from her chest and the triangular object affixed to it, as rain began to sprinkle on her slightly upturned face.

“... I could ask the same myself ...” came the voice, from no definite point in front of her.  “What do *you* want?  Those thugs you attacked are still twitching, so you evidently didn’t kill them...  but you didn’t destroy their merchandise either.  What was the point?  Were you just blowing off steam?”

Tandy’s face curled into a snarl.  This wasn’t helping her mood.

“Who’s talking??” she growled.  “Show yourself!”

But even as she said it, her searchlights hit a certain section of the wall, and for whatever reason, began to sear away the disguise of her lurking tormentor.  A crouching humanoid figure slowly became distinct from the wall, its wet, liquidy flesh shimmering as it unwillingly turned colors, no longer mimicking the bricks behind it.  Tandy saw the way it squatted on the horizontal surface, facing down toward her, its feet affixed to the wall like it was on solid ground.  The pair of arms dangling in the air below its feet.  And the way the flesh of its back rose in a plume to adhere further up on the wall.

And as the rain came loose from the clouds, against all her better judgment and experience with strange sights, Tandy Bowen snapped.

The storm raged around him, blocking out the skyscrapers to his front and sides and obscuring the ground far below, but Rich was too lost in thought to really register anything around him anyway.  The large drops pattered against the slick, water-tight fabric of his uniform and made small plinking sounds as they hit his helmet.  He flew roughly in the direction of his team’s abandoned factory headquarters on the edge of the East River, but he was in no hurry to get there. After all, what could he do once he arrived?

He’d have to tell his friends about the personal diary of their late teammate Silhouette he’d found, and that his discovery of it had been hardly an accident; he’d gone rummaging through the recently-departed young woman’s personal belongings.(*3)  And that in it she’d applied two different names to her equally-departed lover Bandit.  But what did it mean, why did he apply so much significance to it?

Bandit was a jerk.  Not to mention a sociopath.  Rich wouldn’t put much past a guy who, upon finally meeting his long-lost brother, devoted his life to ruining and then killing him.(*4)  Was it so hard to believe that Bandit had just lied to Sil?  Told her one name, and then later changed him mind?  Darryl and Joseph could both be his names, one his first name, the other his middle name.  There were plenty of logical explanations for a little inconsistency like that.

So why did this coincidence make the hairs on the back of his neck stand up?

Rich sighed, and the surface of his helmet rippled, the red star-shaped head ornament in the front blinking closed over his eye lenses, like an alien windshield wiper.  He knew why the Darryl/Joseph thing bothered him so much.  He didn’t want to believe Sil was dead, and so he clung to whatever might imply that there was more to the events of the past week than the obvious.  It had all happened to suddenly, it’d been so completely unexpected.  How could any of them guessed Bandit was so much more unbalanced than he’d ever seemed?  Sociopathic, sure, but trying to blow up NYC with a nuclear device to kill one individual was a little much.  It just... seemed so unreal.

When he thought about it, it was like remembering a dream.

Blue eyes wide, hands glowing with white fire lancing out into a half dozen lines, connecting her with the strange being in front of her.  The creature let out a grunt of pain, but Dagger couldn’t hear the chorus of cries echo around in his head as her light-knives collided with the tendrils of flesh he formed to block them, which fell limp, trailing from his chest and shoulders.  The wild look on the girl’s face was anything but diminished at the stretching of his flesh, but before she could fire off another salvo, Hybrid was talking her down.(*5) “Look, I’m not one for the traditional hero-hero misunderstanding/conflict, all right?  Could you cut it out, calm the &^@( down, and stop it with the energy bolts?  Chris, I’d expect a hellova lot more from one of the Warriors!  How’d you get past Vance anyway?  I woulda figured he was a little more stringent about who he let on the team than this!”

Dagger didn’t drop her hands, or her guard, but the creature had gotten her attention.  A second volley of light-knives hauled before the energy got to her fingertips.

“Uh... what?” she began.  She hadn’t used her voice in the several hours she’d been exercising her tumultuous emotions, and she was surprised at how detached from speech she’d gotten.  “I’m... I’m not a Warrior.  I know them, but I’m not one of them.  Why’d you say that?”

The creature cocked his head slightly, and she got the uncanny feeling that he rolled his eyes, though she could see no change in the huge, white eyespots taking up half of each side of his face.  Holding out a bluntly clawed, white-palmed hand, he pointed to her chest.  Tandy looked down, right at the Warriors commbadge she’d absentmindedly put on the chain attached to the front of her leotard.  “Oh!  Mi -- or rather, Turbo gave this to me.(*6)  So I can stay in contact with her and the team.”

Tandy frowned at the creature, which seemed less menacing than curious to her now, as it reeled out more red streamers of its flesh to engulf those she’d stunned with her knives and pull them back up into its body.  She’d seen far worse in her time among the paranormal, and as this being seemed more human than not, and had not yet proved to be any sort of a threat to her, she continued speaking rather than attacking.  “I’m not one of the Warriors, and I’m not interested in joining them either.”

“Really.”

Dagger nodded, her brow arching and face hardening into a frown at the undeniably sarcastic tone in the creature’s soupy voice.  “Don’t take this the wrong way, ma’am, but your cleavage is quite an attention-getter without a large red W in the middle of it.”  Dagger angrily began to interrupt, but the creature cut her off:  “For someone as uninterested in the Warriors as you’re claiming, you’re certainly displaying their logo in an obviously spot.

Tandy self-consciously brought her hand up over her chest, plucking the emblem from her jewelry.  It wasn’t her fingers that smoldered when she replied.

“Who the hell are you to judge me, and how involved or not I am in something, when you haven’t even met me, don’t know me, and don’t even have the slightest clue what my situation is??  For that matter, who the hell are you anyway?  How do you know the Warriors?”

Considering what had gone on before, Tandy was somewhat taken aback by the quiet, cautious tone in his voice.  And a little irritated.  She was in a fighting mood.  “I’m... well...  My name’s Scott.  I’ve called myself Hybrid for the last year or so, but the more I think about it, the more uncomfortable I am with it. See, it just doesn’t feel right, it doesn’t fit me.  As for the Warriors, I knew Vance a while ago, and when I got my... powers... I met the Warriors through him.”(*7)

“Well Scott...  My name’s Tandy.  I’ve been thinking about changing my ‘hero handle’ too.  I’ve gone by Dagger for years, but since my partner Cloak and I... sort of... broke up... I’ve been thinking that I need to change it.  Find my own identity outside him, you know?”

“Sure, I understand.  Probably better than you’d guess.  What happened between the two of you that’s got you so wary of joining another group unit?”

“I didn’t” (Tandy started to snap, but became quieter, and less emphatic.)  “.. say that.”  She may not have said it, but if she was making it so painfully obvious, broadcasting it so strongly, there would be nothing served by denial.  A few years ago, when she’d been temporarily turned blind,(*8) she’d learned a short mantra which she’d forgotten until that moment, a sentence that applied just as well to her situation now as it had then.  “I’m going to be over this sometime,” the saying went.  “Why not now?”  The sooner she came to terms to what Tyrone had done, and what it had caused between them, the quicker she could learn to deal with it, and move on with her life.  Lying to others (or to herself) did nothing but compound the damage.  And so, rather reluctantly, she started to open up.

The factory came into view in the distance, and in seconds he was hovering above it.  Rather than signal the skylight’s opening mechanism with his helmet radio, and let the rain ruin whatever project Carlton might be working on below, Rich landed on the roof of the second level, and went inside through the door.

Coming down the open metal stairs from the upper level, Rich’s helmet pealed itself back from his face, coiling around his neck, and the rest of his suit rippled, tossing off all the rainwater clinging to it.  It was dark inside the main room of the Crashpad, lit by the flickering greenish light from a large-screen computer monitor, in front of which sat Carlton LaFroyge, who’d blackmailed the group into letting him hang out with them, and later lightened up and helped the team with data analysis and researching.(*9)  Rich was still just as hard on the kid as he had been, but since he got his powers back, his real feelings had softened.  He had gained a begrudging respect for the kid, and was almost starting to like him.  Almost.

“Carlton, I...” Rich began, and paused for a minute.  How could he phrase his request so it didn’t sound incredibly goofy?  Carlton turned around to face Rich, eyebrows arched.  He still wasn’t used to Rider asking for his help, especially not in such a non-antagonistic way.

“I need you to search for a couple names through Taylor Foundation files.  Think you can handle that?  It’s about... Sil, and what just went down with Psio-...” Rich trailed off, at a sound from elsewhere in the ‘pad, what amounted to the living room.  It was Robbie’s voice, and it was annoyed.

“What the hell??  Carl-tonnnn!!  What’d you do to the TV?!?”  Loud, fast footsteps, and then the door swung open, and Robbie, in his torn jeans and a white t-shirt proclaiming “THE AQUABATS!” in big letters across the front, burst in.

“Hey Carl,” (Carlton hated being called that) “Why’d you break the TV? Couldntcha just *buy* electronic $#!& when you need it for your dorky little projects, rather than take apart stuff the rest of us use??”

Carlton smacked the arm of his chair, and snapped back.  “Robbie, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.  I didn’t touch your precious TV, or anything else around here.” 

 “Whatever.  It didn’t turn on with the remote, or with the power button, and when I pulled the back out from the wall to check the connections, I found the entire back of it ripped out and gutted.  Don’t tell me you don’t know what’s going on.  Who else around here is going to rip open the bigscreen?”  Rich sighed heavily.  He wasn’t in the mood for this.  The little high school kids were messing up the fine inwardly-drawn funk he had going, and he didn’t appreciate it.  But before he got a chance to interrupt, Carlton. with a sly smirk quickly creeping onto his face: “Speedballdwin, you and Foresight went into the living room an hour ago to watch movies, and you’re only *now* discovering that the TV isn’t working?  How come it took so long?”

Robbie opened his mouth, but nothing came out.  Then he turned bright red. Hindsight giggled, but before he could say any more, Rich stepped between the two, saving Robbie from further embarrassment.  “Carlton, not to distract you from your little bitchfest, but would it kill you to do that search for me?  The names are ‘Joseph’ and ‘Darryl,’ and it could be important.”  Carlton opened his mouth to say something further, but a burning glare from Rich (coupled with little green trails of energy bubbling out from the corners of his eyes) made him close it again.  After another moment, he turned back around, and started pecking away at the keyboard.

“Joseph and Darryl?” came a feminine, slightly accented voice from the doorway where Robbie stood, and the three males turned to see Rina Patel, her Indian features strangely accented by the green glow of the computer.  “What’s the significance of those two names?”

(For a couple of months, Rina had been an active part of the Warriors under the code-name Timeslip, using her mutant time-distortion powers to switch her mind with past and future versions of herself, and to warp time so she could move at superhuman speeds.  Though she’d sacrificed her gift to stop the Dire Wraith queen Volx’s bid to destroy humanity’s superhuman population, she’d stayed on with the team.  The most obvious reason was that even though she no longer had her overt time-traveling ability, she was still highly, almost uncannily insightful into future events, taking the data Hindsight compiled and interpreting its meaning and possible ramifications.  Robbie had jokingly referred to her as “Foresight” one day, and to everyone’s surprise [his most of all], it seemed to have stuck.  Robbie was the less obvious reason she’d stayed with the team.  Rich knew there was... something... between them, just from body language, but he’d had no idea anything would actually develop.  He was, of course, proud of the toothpick, and the first to cheer like crazy if Rob got lucky, but couldn’t for the life of him see what Rina saw in him.  Or at least, that’s what he claimed to himself, repeating that for her, Robbie was basically jailbait...)

After a moment’s pause, Rich explained.  “I went by Sil’s old place today, and I found her diary.(*10)  Those names came out of it.  I thought it might be helpful to know whatever we could about them.  One of them is Bandit’s real name.”

The sound of fingers on keys stopped abruptly, and Carlton slowly turned his head in Rich’s direction, eyes slightly glazed over, an inquisitive frown on his face.  “Rich...  Uh...  Bandit’s real name is Donyell.”(*11)

The silence that followed was broken only by a low rumbling of thunder outside, and a comment from Robbie almost too quiet to be heard.  “One dead psycho boyfriend with three different first names?  Why am I getting this weird feeling of deja vu?”

“Cloak... didn’t understand me.  He couldn’t relate to my needs and desires if he didn’t share them.  Couldn’t - or didn’t want to - understand why I needed more than just his company, more than his support alone.  It was always this ‘either you’re with me, or you’re against me’ thing with him.  No middle ground, no shades of gray.  If I wanted to spend time with others my own age, others who share the same gift and responsibility that he and I do, he felt like I was abandoning him.”  Despite herself, she smirked a little.  “Sure, he plotted against me and my friends and got a couple of them killed, and then lost his powers; but even so, us breaking up was pretty inevitable.(*12)  Unless one of us changed, a *lot*, we were eventually gonna find us separated like this.”

Scott spoke quietly, his voice less muffled now, like he was pulling away the alien flesh from in front of his mouth.  “But rather than letting you continue drifting apart organically, he tried to salvage your partnership by stabbing you in the back.”  Tandy look at the ground where it intersected the wall, and did respond.  It was a statement, not a question.  Nothing she needed to affirm or deny.

“Partnerships, especially strong ones, are dangerous like that, no matter what kind they are.  Take me, for example.”  Scott held out an arm, examining the syrupy, red and white flesh that covered it under the soft, life-sustaining glow of Dagger’s light.  “I’m permanently bonded with four alien creatures.(*13)  Total twist of fate, nothing I could have foreseen, nothing I could have avoided without compromising what I believe in.  We can’t be separated, or we’ll all die.  Not exactly the same as your situation I know, but close anyway.

“No matter how any of us may feel, we’re a unit now.  We can’t just break up if we get on each other’s nerves.  Believe me, these things have some... quirks... that irritate the hell out of me.”  The flesh rippled, turning a darker shade, the coloration roiling like the storm clouds above in response to Scott’s words, and his negative emotions he was expressing.  “But the time it was hardest to stay bonded with these things was really soon after we first joined, when they almost killed a friend of mine just because of the preconceived opinions they came into our partnership with.  About everyone who shared his job.  Except me. I had to... talk them down, prove that even if he was a Guardsman, he was a good person anyway.  Show them that even though they’d been mistreated by people in the same uniform in the past, it wasn’t *right* for them to judge everyone based on their past experiences.  Sure it, everything worked out in the end, but... it’d still happened.  And that was the hardest part of the whole situation..” Dagger nodded thoughtfully.  She didn’t quite understand the story he was relating, but she had no trouble picking up the point of it.

“I know what you’re saying about having a partner that doesn’t understand you,” he continued after a momentary pause.  The alien material over his face had been pulled apart into a mesh, with tendrils spanning across his face.  She could see his lips moving, his teeth, the glint of her light off his eyes.  “These symbiotes I’m wrapped in may try to duplicate human brain processes, but they’re still *aliens*.  And they’re from a species that’s instinctually driven to attach themselves to people like me and you and drain them of whatever they need to survive.  All the neural mimicking and lessons in humanity in the world aren’t going to make them anything but alien.  We’ve got almost nothing in common, physiologically speaking, beyond that we’re both warm-blooded, sentient animals. The only thing we can do is find what other similarities we have and build on them, and learn to understand how we differ, and figure out how to deal with it. I don’t know if I’m making any sense or not, but... I hope I am.”

Scott stopped talking, resting his elbow on his knee and his forehead on his hand, and looked down at himself, his head now totally exposed, the ‘mask’ of his living armor dissolved into a ring of tendrils around his neck.  A moment of silence passed between the blonde, leotard-clad insecure young mutant and the alien symbiote-clad slightly older hybrid creature, not an uncomfortable silence, not a search for something to say.  Just a moment to digest some things they’d both already known, but had not quite formulated the same way before.

“I... I’m gonna go find Cloak.  It’s not fair to keep avoiding him.  And I need to talk to the Warriors too.  Scott... Thank you.  You’ve helped a lot.  I hope I’ll see you again sometime soon.”  And Dagger leapt off into the night.  Not noticing among the rain several harder “drops” hitting her back as she disappeared into the darkness.

Once again, a voice like a sock of jello in a wringer spoke into the night, this time to someone who was far out of earshot.  “It was nice to meet you Tandy. Helpful too.  I hope things go better for you from now on.  Better with you and Cloak.  And with the Warriors.”

The four young adults sat around the table, after almost an hour of discussion even more confused and spooky than they were when they’d started.  The talking had reached an impasse again, and group sat frowning as the rain beat down on the metal roof overhead, the computers near the wall whirring and humming in activity.  Niels, the orange tomcat that made the Crashpad his home, jumped up into Rina’s lap, and she tried to smooth his fur, perpetually matted as it was by the kinetic field that flowed around him.  Rich impatiently drummed his alien fabric-clothed fingers on the table.  Robbie picked up Silhouette’s diary, and turned to the earmarked pages for the dozenth time, his eyes moving blankly across the page, no longer registering anything from it.

A quiet creaking and a muffled metallic clang from elsewhere in the building heralded the addition of a new viewpoint to the stagnant debate, and the four looked up expectantly at the sound of soggy footsteps approaching the room. Dagger came into the darkened primary meeting room and was greeted by five expectant faces.  She stood for a moment, not quite sure what was going on, looking at the two Warriors, the cat, the former Warrior and the one-time Warrior groupie.  She hadn’t expected a welcoming committee; even though it wasn’t all that late, all of them had places to be.  But in retrospect, it wasn’t surprising.  Rich had finally realized what immature dumbasses his two roommates were a week or two ago, and had been hanging around the ‘pad a lot since then; Robbie liked to spend his free time there because it was much more roomy than the apartment he shared with his mother, and because the big-screen television in the rec room had satellite TV; Carlton didn’t have anywhere better to go; and Rina... must’ve been there for Robbie, by the looks of how close together they’d pulled their chairs.  But by their expressions, there was something going on.

“Hey Tandy, I’m glad you showed up!” bubbled Robbie.  “Some really weird stuff’s been goin’ on, and we’re all pretty much out of explanations, so it’s great to have someone new to contribute!  Rich found this diary here, which belonged to Sil, and --”   Dagger was not in the kind of mood to discuss strange coincidences and weird goings-on, and before Speedball’s monologue got too uncomfortable for her wandering mind to focus on, she cut him off.”

“Robbie, I really can’t talk about this right now.  I’m sorry, but I only came here because I’m looking for Tyrone.  Is he still around?  Has anyone seen him?”

Rina spoke.  “He left a little while after you did this afternoon.  Back to St. Anne’s.”(*14)

Tandy’s head jerked back a little, and she frowned.  “St. Anne’s?”  Rina nodded. “St. Anne’s Parish?  He said that’s where he was going?”

Rina’s brow furrowed too, a little.  She wasn’t quite understanding what she’d said that was so strange.  “Yeah.  He told me earlier that it was your and his hideout, when he was still Cloak.  Is there something wrong with that..?”

Not in the mood for it or not, it was evident that Tandy wasn’t going to be able to avoid discussing weird synchronicities now.  “Cloak and I lived in the Holy Ghost Church on 42nd.(*15)  It's abandoned, kind of run down, has been for a while. St. Anne’s Parish was where my uncle Mike used to work, when he was alive.(*16)  Ty knows that...”

The group looked at each other, all wearing similar expressions, various depictions of “Oh, no, not again...”  Silhouette ‘confused’ about her boyfriend’s name, important objects vanishing into thin air around the Crash-Pad, Cloak ‘confused’ about where he and Dagger had lived for the past several years... Weird, dreamy feelings surrounding events in the past week, coupled with intense deja vu in Robbie and especially Rich, and a vague feeling in Rina and Carlton that it was all somewhat familiar...

The sound of a key in the door made everyone jump, and as a unit they swiveled around as the door handle turned.   “What now..?” asked Carlton under his breath as the door swung open.

The bleary glow of the streetlights outside back lit the figure in the doorway. Though his features were lost in the darkness and the glare from behind, his height and shape told them who he was even before he opened his mouth.  In a quiet, meek voice, the figure spoke.  “Ta... Tandy?”

“Ty?”  Dagger was already pushing back the chair she was about to sit down in. “Tyrone?  What the hell is going on??”

A flash of lightning somewhere in the distance flooded through the doorway, obscuring the figure in the sudden illumination.  From Rina’s lap came a loud, frightened hiss, and the sound of Niels leaping to the floor and skittering into the darkness.  It took only a moment before the strike’s after-image cleared, but when the assembled Warriors and hangers-on could see again, in the doorway stood a completely different individual.

Taller, gaunter, fair skinned, his hair long and blonde, with a few strands intricately braided together.  Mirror shades that glinted in the green light of the computer monitors, and a tight, wrinkled black t-shirt with a silk-screened drawing of a crucifix crossed out across the chest, half tucked-in to a pair of tattered blue cords.  A vinyl trench coat that would be stylish if it wasn’t bright yellow.

In seconds, Nova’s helmet wrapped itself up around his face and green energy was boiling from his tear ducts, flooding out into the air in front of him; Speedball bumped his elbow against the table and was engulfed in a kinetic field which solidified into 37 pound of idealized self-image (complete with four extra inches of height, chiseled muscles, superhero spandex and jello hair) and some glowing, multi-colored run-off bubbles hanging in space around him; and Dagger’s hands erupted in halos of deadly white light. At the same time the entire assembly exclaimed as one, and then each began spouting questions at once.

All:  “Mathemanic?!?!”

(Dagger:  “What have you done with my partner?!”)

(Carlton:  “I thought you got gutted!!”)

(Nova:  “What the &^%# is going on here??”)

(Rina:  “This is all *your* doing, isn’t it!”)

(Speedball:  “Where the hell’d you get that coat?  Have you absolutely *no* sense of taste?!”)

But Thomas Sorenson, better known as Mathemanic of the psychotic vigilantes Psionex, didn’t answer any of them.  “You shouldn’t fight it!  All you’re doing is weakening my control over the *rest*, and when they realize what I’ve done, we’re all in more trouble than we were to begin with!”

Once again, the Warriors burst out at once.  Dagger growled, “What are you *talking* about?!  What’s going on??  Where’s Tyrone, what have you done to him!!” while Nova and Speedball looked at each other.  “The dreamy feel of the last couple days...” began Rich; “... all the inexplicable inconsistencies...  I *knew* it was deja vu!” Robbie concluded for him.  “Just like the whole thing with that Clements kid Darkling whacked!”(*17)

Rich grabbed Dagger’s shoulder, and she violently shrugged it off.  “So who’re you keeping alive this time, Tommy?”  Rich growled, his tone slightly patronizing.

Mathemanic’s frown deepened.

“You,” he said quietly.  “All of you.”

Scott Washington closed the door to the cupboard above the sink as quietly was he could and put the dog dish he’d gotten out on the kitchen counter.  The wall separating the kitchen from his mother’s bedroom was painfully thin, and she’d been so restless and paranoid since he and his little brother Derek were ambushed and shot in their own living room.(*18)  The last thing she needed was to discover her son feeding iodine to the four alien creatures that he’d become bonded with. Some things he just didn’t want to explain.

As he sat down in the living room, putting the dog dish full of iodine and water on the scuffed, cigarette burn marred coffee table, he reached out with small tendrils of his alien Other and turned the power nob on the small tv, making the volume very low and sinking the thin stream of liquid into the speaker, so he could hear fine without it waking up his mother.  The 11 o’clock news was on, but he didn’t pay too much attention to it as the rest of his symbiotes pulled themselves off his skin and dropped little feeder tendrils into the iodine. Instead, he paid more attention to the growing sense of alarm he was feeling from somewhere else in the city.

When the girl Tandy left earlier that night, Scott had fired several thing lines of symbiote-stuff at her, hitting her back like rain drops and pooling into the middle, integrating themselves together.  He’d learned that by leaving a bit of symbiote flesh on a person or object, he could trace their location by picking up the telempathic signal sent by the detached alien cluster.  Unfortunately, when separate from the main body of the symbiotes, these clusters tended to die very quickly, and then stop sending him information.  Usually, at least.

When Dagger hit him with her light-knives when he first revealed his presence to her, his symbiotes had detected something strange about the energy.  Somehow, it was the energy of life, and while when she projected it offensively it could be used to “cancel out” other life energy and incapacitate or kill living tissue, it was generally not only harmless, but beneficial.  As the symbiote cluster attached to her back had discovered; not only was it able to blend in with her suit to avoid detection, something the detached flesh usually couldn’t do, the energy Tandy radiated fed and nurtured the symbiote cluster, allowing it to not only cling to life for much longer than usual, but to act as more than just a tracer.  It was now acting as something like a danger sensor, ‘reading’ Tandy’s emotional state and relaying it back to Scott.  If she got into trouble, he’d know.  And he tagged her with his symbiote in the first placed because he’d had a feeling she would.

Which was now seemingly confirmed by the turmoil of emotions, not the least of which was alarm, that he was picking up from her.  Something was happening, something verging on conflict, and he wasn’t sure what to do about it yet. Should he wait until she was definitely in trouble, and possibly intervene much too late, or follow the early warning and hope he’d arrive in time, at the danger of it being a false alarm?

And then he looked up at the television, in the middle of a report from earlier in the day.  Saw a half-dozen young costumed miscreants called Psionex, a menacing-looking living cape with a human face concealed in its hood, and a couple of people who were supposed to be dead.  And knew he’d have to make up his mind really quick.

Mathemanic’s answer met with a predictably negative response.

“What the hell are you talking about??” yelled Nova, his balled-up fist leaving a huge crater in the center of the table they’d been seated at, its metal legs folding outward.  With a loud crash, it collapsed to the floor.  The others reflexively stepped back from it.  Nova didn’t even notice.  “Would you *please* make a little !^&#ing sense??” he continued, waving his fist in front of him.

Mathemanic swallowed hard, his eyes on the table.  He’d been hit by Nova before, and it wasn’t something he was looking forward to have repeated.(*19)  "I had get Silhouette and Cloak away from you until you know what danger you were in.  They aren’t in control of their actions, not completely.  Neither is Bandit.  And letting any of them stay in your collective confidences would have left you all dead before long!”  His declaration fell on deaf ears.  His next sentence didn’t help either.  “Don’t you understand, I’ve been manipulating you for your own protec --!”

A flash of green energy, and Mathemanic was knocked off his feet, dropping hard onto the cement floor.

Nova stepped another foot closer to him, his eyes still streaming with the aftermath of a gravimetric pulse.  “If you’re gonna lie to us, you coulda least tried to make it believable!  Sil and Bandit are sort of dead, and that’s not something too many people recover from, not around here anyway.(*20)  And Cloak’s powerless!”  Rina and Robbie, both of whom were picking up on the situation Mathemanic was illucidating faster than Rich, stepped closer to him, but before they could cut in, Nova’s anger was halted from a completely unexpected source.

The surface of Mathemanic’s slick yellow trench coat rippled, and then poured outward into the air above and in front of his sprawling form, melting into an undetailed upper torso and a smooth, featureless face, of the same bright yellow as the rest of the ‘coat.’

(Rich’s building energies halted, and he unintentionally whispered, “He really does look like a mannequin from Chernobyl...”)

(At his shoulder, Speedball grinned.  “I *knew* it!  Abject lack of self-awareness notwithstanding, I was sure even Tommy Sorenson had more fashion sense than to wear a coat like *that* for no reason!”)

“Hear him out.” came the smooth, cultivated voice that resonated out the android Primus’ smooth face.(*21)  "If it wasn’t for him, you’d probably all be dead.”

Mathemanic stiffly got to his feet, and wiped the back of his hand under his bleeding nose, wincing slightly as he started to speak again.  “Now, if you’re a little more ready to listen, I’ve got some information, some explanations, revelations, whathaveyou, that are fairly crucial to your continued survival. Both as a unit and as individuals.”  And as Mathemanic began to unfold his narrative, his muscles started to relax, and he began to calm down and think a little more positively.  Maybe things won’t end so disastrously now, he thinks. Maybe all his deceits, manipulations and blatant lies will work out for the best after all.

But so caught up in his narrative is he that he fails to hear the sound of the bouncing cat perched up on the metal stairs as he hisses and growls deep in his throat at the pair of black eyes which hang suspended in the gloom, surrounded by a thin film of liquid shadow, relaying sensory information to someone far distant, someone in a position to make things far worse once again for our heroes...

To Be Continued...

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