Shadows of Insanity - Chapter Two

The smell of drying blood and viscera should probably have been a sign that things were not going to go according to plan. But then again, when do I ever plan? Almost never. So hah, take that fate! How do you ruin a plan when there isn’t one?

You know what the best part of my abilities is? Turning every stairwell into an elevator. No, not literally. That would be a terrible power. Unless Apotheosis decides to make the world into a life size game of chutes and ladders again. But what would be the odds of that happening a third time? I’m betting very low.

Anyway, what I meant was, I stepped from dark corner of the stairwell to dark corner of the stairwell one floor above the previous dark corner, over and over until I started seeing “weird shit™”. Besides no sane person takes the elevator anymore. And what am I if not a paragon of sanity. I think that to myself, as I'm pelted in the face by what felt and smelled suspiciously like ocean spray…on the 22nd floor…in the stairwell. Hm.

Well, I’ll be damned if I don’t enjoy a good mystery, so I walked to the door leading to the 22nd floor hallway and yanked that fucker open. I had a good split second before I managed to shadow-step into the hallway itself which left me soaked up to my knees in the lake’s worth of saltwater that spewed out of the doorway like a haphazard gas station burrito breakfast after a few hours.

Quite an image, I know. What can I say? I’m an artist.

What was infinitely more interesting than that, was the eight foot tall being made of salt water, coral, and an entire school of fish that was fighting someone that I recognized.

“Ionic, good to see you again.” I said to the very powerful electrokinetic.

All he said in reply was a series of grunting noises, though that was probably because of the series of punches to his sternum that the sea creature decided to levy his way, rather than in response to my greeting. Probably.

Ionic had been an interesting member of The Saviors to meet. If you can call unchecked aggression and less than heroic homicidal tendencies “interesting”. He had fair skin, bright electric blue eyes, and platinum blonde hair that was about medium length, in that classic style of “short enough to not be a liability in a fight but long enough to look like Zeus’ younger cousin”.

Does Zeus have cousins? Probably.

According to word on the street, AKA The Savior’s files that I kind of sort of maybe took a look at when I was in their headquarters letting them have the honor of hiring me to do what I was already doing, he used to have a robotic body that was used to contain his immense amount of bioelectricity after he burnt out his original one, but then an Activated by the name of Ambrosia made him a new fully organic body. Which is kind of the full genetic equivalent of finding out that someone isn’t a natural blonde in my opinion. Like yeah, he might have a pretty boy thing going on, but they’re not real, if you know what I mean.

When I saw arcs of bright blue electricity start to form around Ionic, that’s when I decided that I should probably just leave him to his little spat and make my way further in. Which I did.

Ignoring the sounds of one-sided combat coming from behind me, I made my way towards the next closest throwdown that I could hear. There was an even bigger fight going down upstairs too that was deafening, even through the walls. I came upon an interesting sight. A man with pitch black skin and bloodshot yellow eyes all over his body. Like, ALL over his body. Even on the soles of his feet. It was pretty disturbing. You would also think that he would have noticed me, but I guess he was a little preoccupied.

Luckily enough for him his feet didn’t seem to touch the floor. He just levitated about a foot off the ground. Currently throwing miniature black holes at the guy and levitating as well, was Dr. Elias Magnus, better known around here as Darkstar. Elias is a local legend, born and bred in New York post-Activation. He was a scientist trying to find a way to harness different forms of esoteric energy to try and find a permanent replacement for all of the old-world power sources.

One critical mishap later and next thing you know, he’s Activated. He’s one of the only people I know of that wasn’t born with his powers. Then again, maybe he was, but the accident was the first time he ever used them out of reflex. I’ll have to pick his brain about that at some point.

Nice guy, honestly. Unless you piss him off. Then you get to be subjected to having your entire body shoved into a blackhole the size of a human fist. A normal human fist, not like the planet crackers on Atlas.

I sit there for a minute watching old man Elias, who is about a third of my age by the way, before he notices my presence and then gets his block knocked off by an invisible punch while he’s distracted. You would think that he would know better than to let his guard down in a fight, man his age and all. Also, apparently Eye-guy is telekinetic. So, I do Elias the favor of wrapping inky black tendrils around the many-eyed man and giving him a second to breathe. I’m a nice guy like that.

Elias whips around the guy in the air and aims a fist with a black hole wrapped around it right into the back of the many-eyed man’s eyeball laden head. The ensuing impact splatters blood and eyeball juice everywhere and sends Eye-guy careening out of a 22nd floor window and down to the streets below. I guess he knocked him out, or maybe he can’t actually fly and can only levitate, because the poor bastard hits the ground below at full force and splats.

“Void?! What are you doing here? I thought you were rejec-passed over.” The 43-year-old scientist says, doing a terrible job of covering the blatant insult.

“Just doing my civic duty, as always. And I wasn’t rejected. I declined.” I lied through my teeth at the man. He frowned at me, then sighed.

“Look, have you seen Sentinel or Gigaton?”

“Sentinel yes, Gigaton no.”

“Good, then he must still be fighting Redstar.” he said, relief evident in his voice.

I pushed past the initial thought of why so many people needed star in their name and told him where I saw Sentinel. He visibly paled, which was impressive given his already pale complexion. Between that and the grey streaks in his otherwise jet-black hair and beard, he had a goth Dr. Frankenstein thing going on. Actually, I imagine that this is what I would have looked like about 70 years ago, if I could age that is. Then he turned and started nervously pacing, even though his feet still weren’t touching the ground.

“…no.” he said. “Not again. It’s going to be too late by the time he comes back again.” Then he turned back to me.

“I need you to do me a favor. I need you to find Eldritch and Starchild and tell them that Ana…Gigaton, needs backup.”

“Another star name? Why are there so many of you? Not that Void is the most creative name or anything but still-”

“Nicholas! Please hurry!” he said. I frowned at the mention of my first name. I wasn’t aware that he knew it, or that anyone did. Except for me and a whole host of dead relatives and acquaintances.

I just nodded and shadow-stepped away from the room. Next stop, the 23rd floor.

The sight of Eldritch and Starchild wasn’t all that surprising, given that I was told that they were here. The sight of the…thing, that they were fighting was another thing entirely. It was a hulking mass of irradiated tumors and body horror. Fun. And then there was a man dressed like an old-world party magician, who kept opening and closing portals to redirect telekinetically thrown objects and energy bolts back at the two heroes. And man let me tell you, what a fight.

But first, more origin stories. Yay!

Eldritch is a pretty big legend. Mostly because he was actually the first Activated on record, technically. It’s a bit complicated.

In 1922 the man that would come to be known as Eldritch was a creole conman on the streets of New Orleans named Achilles Dupont. Selling fake voodoo and hoodoo to all of the naïve and gullible European tourists and refugees on the streets of the French quarter, he would end up crossing the wrong man. A white man by the name of Alistair Wicked.

Fucking ominous name, right?

Achilles found himself kidnapped along with a lot of other “people who shall not be missed”. Alistair’s words not mine. Turns out that Alistair was an occultist who bought a talisman from Achilles that would supposedly protect whoever wore it from malevolent spirits. Except that Achilles was a conman selling nothing of the sort. Not really anyway.

So, when Alistair’s beloved wife Francine wore the talisman during one of their rituals, and against all odds they actually made contact with something, it did nothing to save her from being ripped away to some nightmare dimension by the entity in question.

Achilles and the other people taken by Alistair and his cult were meant to be used in a sacrificial ritual to bring his wife back. But instead, when all the other “sacrifices” had been cut down during the endless chanting juxtaposed with screams cut suddenly short, and Achilles found himself under the ritual knife apologizing and begging for his life to a man that had lost any morality well before he had lost his wife, something…unexpected happened.

Not that anyone noticed at first. See, the knife came down, right into Achilles’ heart no less. But, unlike the others, he was ripped away, just like Francine Wicked had been. And in his place was a single multi-faceted jewel containing the screaming visage of Francine Wicked.

Alright, I may have made that last part up.

But truthfully nothing happened. Alistair’s wife was not returned to him, the entity did not intervene in anyway except by removing Achilles from the world, and Alistair spent the next few years going insane before being convicted of killing his wife and hanging himself in his prison cell.

I’d feel bad, if he wasn’t a racist, murdering, cult leader son of a bitch.

According to the man formerly known as Achilles Dupont, there was a lot more going on behind the scenes, though. He spent an amount of time between a few minutes and literal eons trying to convince an alien, eldritch entity that looked like a dying galaxy to return him home. An odd specification of time, I know. But I’m not the one writing the stories here, just recounting them to an adoring audience is all.

Achilles claims to have made a deal with the entity. Apparently, it hadn’t been aware of anything outside of its own dimension before the Wickeds tore a temporary hole in the walls between its dimension and ours. But now it found itself infinitely curious about all of the things and concepts that flooded the minds of humans. Love, hate, hope, despair. And that was just the surface. Sunlight, grass, ice cream, the list goes on.

The point is that Achilles offered a part of his very soul to the being just to be taken back home. That way it could experience all of those things through the lens of a mortal being, i.e. him, in the safety of its home. Except that, oddly enough, the entity considered this to be a raw trade for Achilles himself. So, it offered a fragment of it’s own essence in return, to replace the part of himself that he would be giving up.

And look, I know what you’re thinking. But Void, how did any of this happen if the world before Activation was mind-numbingly boring and normal? I mean, still awful a lot of the time but in a non-reality shattering way. Good question. I have no idea. But I have some theories. Worldshaper rewriting history? An alternate universe? Or maybe, the world was never as cut and dry as we believed it to be, and we only started paying attention when it became impossible to ignore. Who knows?

Anyway, Achilles, afraid of the consequences of being part eldritch abomination, attempted to turn down the offer but his attempt fell on deaf…well not ears, but you get the point. It didn’t listen. After having a part of his very soul removed and haphazardly replaced with a dark, writhing shard of iridescence like an ill-fitting puzzle piece, he was sent screaming out of that twisted reality. According to him, he awoke back on Earth but in a very different world then the one that he had left behind. And with his heart once more intact.

Oh, and he could also read people’s minds, fly, and crush a man with his mind like a fucking soda can.

Which oddly enough is what he just did to the monstrosity being fought while I was explaining all of this to you. What a coincidence. Body horror is down for the count. Kinda makes you wonder why Eldritch didn’t just do that to begin with.

I yell out across the room and tell Eldritch what Elias had told me. He acknowledges my words and disappears down an adjacent hallway, presumably towards the explosive fight going down on the other side of the building. I also told him that I like his hair. He didn’t react to that part, but as a man with shadow abilities, I kind of wish that I could pull off the black dreads look.

Starchild seemed a bit preoccupied with the magician, who had begun throwing his own energy barrages at the star skinned hero.

Right so, next up for story time is the Radiant Wonder: Starchild.

He was born on a Native American reservation in Dakota post-Activation, though I can never remember which Dakota. I guess it doesn’t matter anyway, both are basically gone now. Nobody knows his real name, but his past is interesting to say the least. Maybe not Eldritch interesting, but still interesting.

According to Lakota tradition he was assigned a “wanagi”, some sort of star spirit meant to protect him, at birth. Except that unlike pretty much every member of his people ever, his star spirit decided that it was not content to watch and protect from the sky. So, it decided to become one with him and give him the power to protect himself, and his people. And that’s about it, as far as public knowledge goes. Didn’t really have a chance to do more than skim his file.

Starchild has glowing white hair, bright nuclear green eyes, and skin like a nebula. Stardust and cosmic gas flit across his form constantly, as if his body is just a human shaped tear in reality that acts as a kind of window into the cosmic void. And he can fly, create bolts of very painful and dangerous plasma, and, perhaps most obvious of all, can survive unaided in the vacuum of space.

Which about brings us to the close of this little scuffle, as Starchild decides to go full supernova on David Copperfield, leaving nothing left.

“Bit much, don’t you think?” I say.

“He kept making jokes about Indian giving every time he redirected a blast back at me. So, no. Excuse me if my patience wore a little thin.” he said back.

I hadn’t heard anything like that, but then again, I was kind of busy talking to you.

“Darkstar said-” I began.

“I heard.” he said, cutting me off. Then he flew down the hallway just as Eldritch had.

“You try to help a guy out, and does anyone give the slightest bit of gratitude? Of course not.”

“Why is the reject still here?” came a particularly electrifying voice.

I turned around to see Darkstar and Ionic coming up the stairs behind me. Right, I had completely forgotten about everyone’s least favorite sparkplug.

“I wasn’t-”

“Don’t care. Leave.” he said before pushing past me and following after the others.

I looked at Darkstar who was giving me a sympathetic look.

“He’s just jealous that I can teleport, and he still has to run down a hallway like a normie.” I said trying to brush off the blatant hostility.

“Nick…Void, you really shouldn’t be here.” he said. Take a wild guess what he did next. If you guessed “levitated down the hallway leaving my pasty ass alone, yet again”, then you are correct.

Well, that’s why I have you. Right? YOU can’t fly away and leave me grasping at the scraps of my ill-fated existence, unlike everyone else. Huh…where did THAT come from? Looks like something has managed to worm its way free of the prison that is my subconscious. Time to put it back where it belongs. Aaaaand…repressed.

What were we talking about? Oh right, Ionic and his ocean of character defects. Well, I suppose we have time to deep-dive into his backstory as well. I didn’t really bother with the full treatment before, but oddly enough I can’t remember why,

Anyway, Ionic was born as Lucien Leclair, a French-American from San Diego. Lucien is one of the handful of people I’ve met that has been around as long as I have. When the Activation occurred, his abilities manifested themselves and the sheer amount of bioelectricity running through his body burned him alive. As if by instinct, the bio-electric field that was his consciousness shunted itself into the city’s power grid in order to survive.

After a few months he was discovered by another legend. Lexicon, a man given knowledge of many Activated by whatever power he had. Of course, back then, he didn’t quite know how to use that power to get at specific information. He just had to go with whatever his super-powered mind spit out. But this is Ionic’s story, not Lexicon’s.

After he was discovered, the government agency that Lexicon worked for found a way to move Lucien into a new mechanical body designed to contain his power. And Lucien himself. See, the thing about Lucien is that the months of crippling isolation without the sensory input that comes with having a human body had a disastrous effect on his psyche. That and whatever method the government had used to rip him out of the San Diego power grid and put him into his new body.

Lucien suffered severely violent psychotic episodes that seemed completely random and could stop as suddenly as they started. So, they added to his body a kind of shut down function that would detect when he was on the verge of emotional instability and then shunt his consciousness into a kind of faraday cage, where he would essentially be put into a timeout sensory deprivation chamber until he calmed down. Yeah, pretty twisted.

He's still an asshole but, nobody deserves that shit.

The “does not exist” agency that employed Lucien, called A.R.E.S. though I have no idea what the name stood for, used Lucien as a super-powered assassin. Well usually assassin would denote some level of subtlety, but in Ionic’s case they kind of just switched his timeout function off and set him loose on whatever unfortunate organization had become enough of a problem to need to be deleted from existence. Obviously, this was back before the world was completely broken, when the world governments still somehow believed that they could control what was happening.

Thankfully for Ionic, his life took a different path when he met a Greek woman going by the codename Ambrosia. Ambrosia was a biokinetic, which meant that she could manipulate the human body on a molecular level. Or animal body. Any body really, as long as it was organic.

Ambrosia had taken to using her abilities to heal less than savory people as a back-alley doctor for hire. Apparently, she had information on several key targets of A.R.E.S. that had been given patch-ups by her, and Ionic had been sent to retrieve said information and then either forcibly recruit her or remove her from the picture entirely. Except that, in a rare moment of non-violent clarity, Ionic begged her to fix him. And she did. Eventually.

Making an entire body from scratch is a lot more difficult then healing a gunshot wound or even a brain hemorrhage, but she figured it out and even managed to curb most of his violent tendencies.

How? I have no idea, but I won’t pretend I’m not curious.

And the rest is history. Just like this building, IF THOSE EXPLOSIONS KEEP GOING OFF!

What the hell is going on back there, anyway?