Ragnarok Alternative Sample Chapters

Chapter One

Christine Dark

New York City, New York, July 4, 2014

Her day started out okay, but it quickly devolved into chaos, mayhem and a fight to the death.

Christine Dark – a.k.a. Dark Justice, a.k.a. Armageddon Girl when her boyfriend wanted to give her a hard time – struck a heroic pose for the cameras. She did it just the way  her publicists taught her: hands on her waist, chin and boobs thrust forward, looking at nothing in particular, a friendly but not too friendly smile on her face. Cheering crowds and roving paparazzo took in the view and recorded it for posterity and Imago4All, this world’s version of Instagram. As usual, she found it hard to do that kind of crapola without breaking out in giggles, but practice was beginning to make perfect.

Luckily, she wasn’t the only cos-player on display, but part of an entire delegation of some of the best-known super-peeps on Earth Alpha. The Freedom Legion were there, best and brightest of them all, according to their press releases, sharing a huge silver platform in Central Park with the city mayor, assorted non-costumed bigwigs, and the local supers, the Empire State Guardians, who were also looking heroic when they weren’t casting furtive glares in the direction of their semi-friendly rivals.

The whole thing still felt rather ludicrous and embarrassing to her. She’d never liked crowds or public speaking. In a few minutes, she was going to step up to the podium and give a ninety-second speech, a piece of ghost-written pap about celebrating life in all its myriad forms and some stuff about recycling. Not her favorite kind of thing.

It wasn’t all bad, though. There were plenty of good reasons to celebrate this particular Independence Day, including the fact that there was a planet Earth around to celebrate on. A few months ago, Vegas odds were very much against that, what with a big angry alien with more power than the combined superhero population of said planet headed their way, intent on killing every last living thing on it. It’d taken a lot of effort and sacrifice, and more than a little bit of luck, to stop the Genocide from turning the Earth into a lifeless ball of cooling lava. A lot of friends and acquaintances had died in the ensuing super-fight, and unlike the comics, those dead peeps weren’t coming back in a couple of years. Dead was dead, even if the International Parahuman Code Name Registry would sooner or later recycle the nicknames of the fallen.

The survivors hadn’t made it out unscathed, either.

Christine glanced at the speaker who’d just stepped up to the podium after the Mayor’s speech (which rated about 0.1 out of 10 in the Gettysburg Address Scale, in her personal opinion). It was the one and only Ultimate, the greatest American hero, idol of literal billions, looking all handsome-macho in his silver and scarlet costume with the big stylized U that generated millions of dollars of revenue in T-shirt licensing royalties alone. His gentle smile and aw-shucks demeanor were lovingly immortalized by thousands of video-recording devices, professional and amateur, as he went on about civic service and helping the less fortunate. Everything about him looked great, which was a great relief to humanity at large, since not too long ago he’d been accused of losing his mind and turning into a murderer, both of which were pretty worrisome considering the big guy could quite literally depopulate an entire country if he was so inclined. In a world where gods were real and very, very powerful, you wanted said gods to be nice, pleasant and humble. The alternative was just too horrible to contemplate. Christine, who had contemplated said alternative, wholly agreed with the sentiment.

Problem was, the nice, pleasant, humble façade was a façade. Not a hundred percent phony, thank God, but not a hundred percent real, either. John ‘Ultimate’ Clarke hadn’t fully bounced back from the many trials and tribulations of the past year or so.

And she was at least partly to blame for that.

On the other hand, you saved the planet almost single-handedly, her brain, always pragmatic as heck, reminded her. So you deserve a chance to be happy rather than play the traditional nurturing female role for the benefit of the big guy.

Something to that, yeah. If she hadn’t been around during the big fight with the Genocide, Earth would have been toast. John had flown around and kicked some butt, but hadn’t accomplished much of anything. In the end, the fate of the world had been decided by hers truly, with a fairly big assist from the guy she’d picked over the All-American Hero. The guy who was standing a few feet off to the side, and who would be giving his own speech several minutes after her.

Mark Martinez, better known as Face-Off, liked giving speeches even less than she did, especially since his normal speech patterns included enough f-bombs for a Tarantino movie. Mark didn’t like people in general, and the feeling was mutual. He was among the least-admired Legionnaires out there, just above Squidhead the Marine Warrior, who looked like a cross between a male mermaid and a D&D Mind Flayer, the poor guy, and also had a powerful fishy smell that no amount of deodorant and cologne could overcome. Mark had no face, which tended to be off-putting at the best of times, and his abrasive ‘tude and inability to suffer fools gladly didn’t help. She loved him with all her heart, but she understood why his comic book had been cancelled for the second time and his merchandising income was less than one tenth of hers.

Christine herself was popular enough to be speaking right after Ultimate. People loved her, something that she still found surprising and more than a little disconcerting. Back when she’d been plain Christine Dark of Princeton Junction, New Jersey, geek girl non-extraordinaire and denizen of Earth Prime, where superheroes only existed in fiction, she’d had twenty-three Facebook friends and about one quarter as many real ones, including her mom and grandfather. Now that she was on Earth Alpha, where super-powers were much too real, her Twitter account had forty million followers, despite the fact that she only posted a couple times a week, about half the posts consisting of cute kitty pics. It was crazy.

Not everybody loved her, though.

There was John, who had been cool and distant since she’d picked Mark over him, for example. He hadn’t been mean to her, had been nothing but cordial and what old-school diplomats would describe as correct. But there was something beneath the cordiality, something that worried her. One of her superpowers was the ability to sense other people’s emotions, but John had taken measures to shut her out. She didn’t know how he felt about her, but she could guess it wasn’t anything warm and fuzzy.

And then there was the woman glaring at her from the Empire State Guardian’s side of the dais. Justice Princess, whose real name was Patricia Dark, the alternate-universe counterpart of the Patricia Dark who’d given birth to Christine. On Earth Prime, Patricia Dark was a total uber-mom, understanding, friendly, maybe a bit too hippy-dippy at times, but someone who took no crap from anybody when the chips were down. She’d raised Christine mostly by herself, with some help from Grandpa Dark, but mostly by herself, and she’d done a darn good job. Her mother’s lessons had kept Christine sane in the face of more super-drama than the entire Chris Claremont run of the X-Men. Unfortunately, the Patricia Dark of this universe didn’t care for Christine, and had made her feelings abundantly clear. It shouldn’t have bothered her all that much, but it did.

Another thing that bothered her a great deal was someone who wasn’t there to give out speeches. Her fellow Legionnaire, Cassius ‘Janus’ Jones, was currently living in self-imposed exile in John Clarke’s Sanctuary out by the Arctic. Cassius had been infected by the evil energies of the Outsiders, the Big Bads who’d been behind most of Christine’s problems since her arrival to Earth Alpha. So far her efforts to find a cure for him hadn’t panned out. She really should be spending more of her time and energy working on said cure rather than making speeches or posing for magazine pictorials.

Her chief ally in that endeavor was Uncle Adam, a.k.a. Brass Man, currently standing perfectly still in his gleaming suit of armor. Uncle Adam was family, sort of, being the clone-scion of Christine’s actual father and the smartest man on the planet, Doctor Kenneth Slaughter. Her uncle had two dads, one of whom was her dad, which made him less of an uncle than a half-brother, but the whole thing was too weird if you thought about it for too long, so Uncle Adam it was. He wasn’t very effusive, much like her father had been, but he meant well, and was one of the few people who could have a major uber-nerd technical conversation with her. Between the two of them, they were working on assorted things. One of their side projects, a desalination system she’d cribbed from a sci-fi novel from Earth Prime, was likely going to get them a Nobel Prize next year and fill the potable water needs of a couple billion peeps.

“And let us welcome the savior of the planet, New Jersey native via alternate reality, and the darling of humanity: please put your hands together for Dark Justice!”

Oh, crap. As usual, she’d lost herself in thought and missed her cue. She recovered quickly enough and made her way to the podium without embarrassing herself. She even remembered to wave and smile as she walked. They’d made her wear high heel boots with her costume this time, and she was pretty sure her bodysuit was a little tighter than it should be, but she hadn’t made a fuss about it. At least she wasn’t wearing a thong, like too many female superheroes in the biz.

She waited for the applause and cheering to die down. “Mr. Mayor, ladies and gentlemen, my esteemed colleagues,” she began. Thanks to her photographic memory, forgetting her lines wasn’t an issue. “Today, we celebrate…”

The earth shook beneath her.

“Holy crap,” she blurted out into the microphone bouquet in front of her. At least she didn’t use any foul language. A tremor in New York couldn’t mean anything but…

“Neo rampage in progress,” she heard through her cochlear implant. “Several fatalities likely.”

“Holy crap,” she repeated. A moment later, she was airborne, along with every Legionnaire who could fly. The Guardians also took to the air. The crowd’s cheering abated fairly quickly. They’d all felt the ground shaking, and knew what that meant: a Neolympian of great power was on the loose, one who either didn’t know better or was actually acting out with evil intent. When gods lost their crap, the consequences were dire.

As she flew several hundred feet above the celebration, her implants gave her a vector. Brooklyn. From this height, she could see a pillar of smoke out in the distance. Crap.

“Legion, deploy!” Ultimate said. It wasn’t as cool as “Avengers Assemble” but it would do.

Christine darted forward, surrounded by her friends and colleagues, hoping to stop whoever was on the rampage before more people died.

Face-Off

New York City, New York, July 4, 2014

I hadn’t been looking forward to giving a speech, but I wasn’t looking forward to a tussle with some batshit crazy Neo, either.

That kind of thing doesn’t happen every day, or even every month. If crazy super-assholes rearranged chunks of real estate that often, most cities would be smoking ruins in short order. But it does happen, and it’s always bad when it does.

I’d been busy going over the lines of my speech, crafted by a team of writers who’d figured out how to make me sound more or less natural rather than a stammering idiot. It was going to be short and to the point. I was going to honor the dead, the eight thousand or so men and women who’d given their lives in the vacuum of outer space, trying to keep the Genocide away from Earth. I was going to mention the names of five normal humans as examples: three women, two men, each from a different country and a different ethnic background. As speeches went, it wasn’t all that bad, and I could say the words and mean them, even though I’d only known a few of the dead. While the Earth had been prepping to fight the Genocide, I’d been enjoying an all-expense paid trip to Hell, so I hadn’t spent much time with the people involved. But I knew plenty about loss; in the past year I’d lost half of my friends.

Now it looked like nobody would hear my speech on account of some crazy asshole rampaging through Brooklyn. Just as well; the network news dickheads would probably have cut to commercial as soon as I started.

“We have fires breaking out. First responders are mobilizing; ETA three minutes. Artemis, Faerie Godfather, assist with the evacuation. Brass Man: containment. Hyperia, Face-Off, Dark Justice and I will engage. The Guardians will act as a mobile reserve at their discretion.”

The officious bastard giving the orders was the leader of Freedom Squad One, Ultimate. Everybody replied with a chorus of ‘Rogers,’ myself included. When the shit hits the fan, you want to have only one leader and zero arguments. I’d learned that lesson over the past few months and it hadn’t been easy. Most of my career, I’d fought alone. It still felt unnatural to have people on my side.

It wasn’t bad, as a matter of fact. I could get used to it, eventually, once the nagging feeling something this good couldn’t last went away.

We made it to Brooklyn in about the time we got our marching orders. We could have made it sooner than that, but when dealing with an unknown foe, it’s best to have a plan. Go in half-cocked and you’re likely to do more harm than good, or even to get killed, although at our power levels that’s not often an issue.

We soon could see the scene: an entire city block had been turned into a smoking crater.

Getting killed might actually be an issue.

My implanted comm system generated a virtual overlay over the wreckage, showing me what had been there before the unsub had blasted the place apart. I knew the area, but the map helped jog my memory. A bunch of auto mechanic places, including two I knew were chop shops; a pawn store, and a storage rental facility. Estimated population, twenty to thirty people.

Estimated survivors, zero.

A glowing humanoid figure stood alone amidst the smoldering ruins. About eight feet tall, his skin shining with the hue of molten iron. I’d never seen him before. A newbie who’d woken up with the power of a god and lost his motherfucking mind. Great.

We went after him, hard. No negotiations, no attempts to get him to surrender. Every second this fucker was allowed to live could mean another twenty to thirty deaths. If he got to a residential area, it could mean another twenty to thirty thousand deaths.

Christine smashed him between two blocks of solid force moving at supersonic speeds; Ultimate hit him like a missile a fraction of a second later, and then it was my turn. I landed a solid punch on the still-standing figure, unleashing enough kinetic energy to turn a battleship into so much scrap.

And bounced off of him, just like Ultimate had. Just as Hyperia did right after me. Fuck.

We recovered quickly, landed on our feet, and moved to re-engage. As we did, Brass Man surrounded the area with a dome of glowing energy that just might be powerful enough to contain the damage. I didn’t like the odds, though; the fact the glowing asshole had survived shots from four of the most powerful beings on the planet was pretty worrisome.

The bruisers in our team surrounded the unsub while Christine nailed him at range, this time using a slender spear of pure force that should have driven a hole right through him but only managed to scratch his finish. Fuck. Then it was up to us three, moving as one, the constant drills paying off. Ultimate went for his head; Hyperia delivered a hypervelocity kick to his gonads. I grabbed one of his arms, shrugging off surface temperatures in the hundreds of degrees, and tried to tear it off as I landed a kick to his ribs.

He felt the multiple blows. We made him roar in pain, and I felt his shoulder break. But he didn’t die. Any of us would have at least been disabled if not killed outright by that triple play. He wasn’t.

His counterattacks were clumsy, untrained; he was moving very fast but swinging wildly, and that’s why we didn’t lose anybody during that close-quarters exchange. If he’d known what he was doing, he’d have put at least one of us in the ground for good.

I caught a haymaker with my forearms, felt one of them break under the impact, and got thrown against Brass Man’s force field. The world dissolved into a red haze for a moment. I heard more impacts, as loud as cannon fire and far more powerful than any cannon ever built, even the big suckers some countries used to shoot satellites into orbit.

When I could see out of my notional eyes again, Hyperia was down, blood spurting out of her ears and nose. Ultimate was still trading punches with the asshole, each blow making the ground shake and the rubble bounce.

I joined in the fun.

Christine Dark

New York City, New York, July 4, 2014

In comic books, battle noises are described by simple onomatopoeia, your basic BANG! POW! KA-BOOM!

It’s very different when it’s happening for real.

It’s more like a constant rolling rumble of thunder interspaced with sudden explosive outbursts, mixed with the sound of your own heartbeat drumming through you. Fire and smoke everywhere as you run or fly through sheer chaos, trying to find you target before your target finds you. Knowing that at any second you may get hit, and knowing from hard-earned experience just how much it’s going to hurt.

POW!

Christine didn’t duck fast enough, and the dull roar and billowing clouds coming from the burning buildings below her were replaced by a blinding flash of light and a sharp crack that was more of a feeling than a sound. The world became a kaleidoscope of motion and pain until she was able to regain control and found herself a mile or three up in the air.

That effing hurt.

Well, she’d wanted to see fireworks this Fourth of July, and there they were. The energy bolt that had sent her up, up and away had turned her into a firework. Her force field was glowing in many colors as it shed some of the energy it had absorbed. The display gave any New Yorker looking up into the sky something pretty to watch. Of course, sensible New Yorkers were staying indoors, well away from any windows, because watching Neos fighting was not good for your health.

Christine looked down and saw a puff of smoke and dust below, looking tiny in the distance and contained by Uncle Adam’s area force field, the same force field she’d crashed through on her way up. A few moments later she heard a thunderous sound. That was probably either Ali, John or Mark, letting the bad guy have it. She’d better rejoin the fray.

Flying down took her a fraction of a second, but by the time she got there, the Brooklyn neighborhood where the fight had started had been thoroughly devastated. Despite the containing force field, the shockwaves generated by the fight had hit the surrounding area like a massive earthquake: buildings had collapsed, the streets and sidewalks had cracks big enough to swallow cars whole, and several minor fires and floods had broken out when gas and water pipes were ruptured. Legion SOP was to move fights away from populated areas, but the perp they were fighting was very hard to move. The less powerful members of Freedom Squad One had been busy evacuating the neighborhood. Christine could only hope all innocent bystanders had been taken to safety. The poor people who’d been in the immediate area when the crazy Neo cut loose were beyond help, unfortunately.

At the bottom of the smoking city-block sized hole that once had held assorted business establishments, the Big Bad traded punches with Ultimate and Face-Off. Or, from Christine’s perspective, her ex-boyfriend and current boyfriend. Two macho men who could leap over tall buildings, or pick them up over their heads.

Two macho men who were getting the crap beaten out of them at the moment. The macho woman of the heavy hitter gang, Hyperia, was already down. Christine could only hope she wasn’t too badly injured.

The villain going mano a mano with her super-pals had no fancy nickname; his powers had apparently manifested that very day, turning him into an eight-foot tall glowing metal humanoid. Luckily the Legion was in town for the Independence Day celebrations, because this bad guy was too tough for the local superhero team.

Case in point: the glowing dude took a right hook from Ultimate that would have knocked the Statue of Liberty all the way to Canada and responded with a super-fast hammer blow that drilled her ex into the ground, followed by a swing that sent Face-Off flying through the air. Yikes.

One of Christine’s special abilities was a set of extra-sensory powers that let her see the flow of energy coursing through a Neolympian. Glowing dude was shining in more than the visual spectrum: he was a blazing cauldron of power the likes of which she’d only seen back during the Genocide War. This guy wasn’t quite in the same league as the alien who’d killed a good twenty percent of the world’s Neo population, including half of its most powerful members, but he was pretty up in there; they could have really used him during the War. And with the two big machos and big bad Hyperia temporarily out of fight, and Brass Man busy throwing a force field around the combatants to keep the collateral damage down, that left…

Little old me.

Big tall and glowing turned towards her as she rejoined the fight. She could pick up his emotions now: he was angry and scared and utterly irrational. The sudden influx of power had completely unhinged him, and all he wanted to do was destroy, to throw a temper tantrum with the power of a god. He was gathering energy to send a bolt of pure force her way, much like the one that had nearly knocked her into orbit.

Christine didn’t give him a chance to try it again.

Her go-to powers when it was time to kick evil butt were the manipulation of kinetic energy and the creation of energy shields.  She’d refined those abilities in the last few months, and learned a couple of useful new tricks. Besides those powers, she was armed with knowledge, courtesy of a cosmic encyclopedia of sorts, a list of Words that could hack reality itself. She glared at the murderous Neo and thought of a very special Word.

Power.

She poured all her willpower into that Word, calling as much energy as she could handle, and maybe a little more.

A bubble appeared around the insane Neo. It soon filled with fire as the melting man unleashed his own power against it. His link to the Source was great as any Neo’s that she’d ever met; he tapped into impossible amounts of energy, driven by anger and desperation. The force bubble began to burn, and the feedback began to burn her as well. Christine couldn’t contain him for much longer. So she did the only thing she could think of: she contracted the bubble, suddenly and violently, adding another Word to the mix, giving whatever she had left to empower it.

Crush. The Word squeezed the fabric of time and space around the rampaging Neolympian.

Visually, the effect wasn’t all that impressive. There were no big explosions, loud noises or any colorful FX. The gigantic form below her just crumpled into a spherical shape that shrunk down to something slightly bigger than a softball ball in less than a second. That’s what happens to even a high Type Three Neolympian when suddenly subjected to a gazillion atmospheres of pressure.

No fuss, no muss. Mama, just killed a man. 

At the moment, a brutal migraine and total exhaustion made it easy not to dwell on her guilty conscience. The knowledge that a Neo of that power level could have killed hundreds of thousands of innocents before being put down was worth something, but not enough.

Using the Words hurt as badly as getting clobbered by the Big Bad. Christine fell to her knees, struggling to stay conscious. Her head was throbbing, and she felt completely wrung out. The amount of energy she’d used against the nameless, and now lifeless Neo had been enormous, spent not only in crushing the man, but in containing the forces unleashed in said crushing. That much pressure generated huge amounts of heat as a by-product. The little ball contained inside the force bubble was full of hyper-dense plasma, the kind of stuff you’d find in the center of a star. Some of the atoms in there had undergone fission, others fusion, not enough of them to generate a chain reaction, thank God, but still plenty for a heck of a blast. If released, the ball would explode and turn much of the city into a blazing inferno. If she let it go, the sudden decompression would have an explosive force measured in kilotons of TNT.

<Christine.> Mark’s mental voice came through their personal psychic link.

<Sorry, honey, but I have a headache.> The pain was really bad, and in the past year or so she’d experienced about every possible kind of pain there was. She’d used too much power, too quickly, and now she was paying for it. Echoes of the Words she’d used bounced inside her skull, sending fresh waves of agony through her. And she couldn’t pass out, or there would be a big boom.

Mark was there a moment later, cradling her in his arms. She dimly sensed the rest of the squad forming up around her.

“Can someone toss that energy ball outside the atmosphere?” she asked weakly. “Fifty or a hundred miles up should do, I think. Avoid space traffic.”

“On it,” John said. He was gone a moment later, holding the bubble despite the way it blistered even his super-duper skin; a couple seconds later, he’d taken the cosmic hot potato into outer space and thrown it even further away, where the damage would be minimal. Good. She finally let go, barely noticing the huge explosion that lit up the sky, brightly enough to be seen by most everyone in the Eastern seaboard.

“Happy Fourth of July,” she said, and passed out.

* * *

Mark’s faceless head was looming over hers when she opened her eyes again.

“Hey,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

“Like crap.” Like dog crap. Her head was still throbbing and her eyes were having trouble focusing. Even her tele-empathic connection to Mark was a bit fuzzy around the edges.

“You almost killed yourself back there,” he said. “And I mean that literally. Adam had to put you back together, and that wore him out. He’s sleeping it off.”

“Sorry. I figured if I didn’t finish the fight quickly, the guy was going to break loose, and you saw how powerful he was.”

“Yeah. He packed a punch like Ultimate’s, or worse, and he was at least as tough. And you crushed him like a bug.”

“He was inexperienced, had no idea how to defend himself against an indirect attack. If I’d tried that trick on someone like you or John, I’d have dropped dead long before you did.”

“Still, that was fucking incredible.” He sensed she wasn’t in the mood to be complimented. “And you did the right thing. You saved the city.”

Unlike her, Mark was a stone cold killer who wouldn’t lose any sleep over taking out a dangerous Neo. But he knew her well enough to try to comfort her, to diminish the guilt that she was feeling underneath the pain of her self-inflicted injuries. He held her tightly in his arms, offering her his shoulder to cry on.

She didn’t cry. It hurt too much to cry, and even if it hadn’t, she’d gotten used to doing terrible things with the best of intentions. She didn’t cry, but she held on to him.

“How’s everyone else?” she asked him after a while.

“Everyone’s up and about. John and Ali checked on you a while ago, but after I told them you were on the mend, they left. Probably bumping uglies just about now.”

Christine made a face. John’s hookup with Ali/Hyperia had come about a couple of weeks after Christine had broken up with him. The whole thing had happened a bit too quickly, and rather spitefully in her opinion. They were still going strong, months later, but she didn’t think it was a healthy relationship. Ali was clearly smitten with John, but Christine didn’t think he reciprocated her feelings.

She didn’t know for sure, though. She couldn’t sense John’s feelings anymore. And it was none of her business.

“How is it?” Mark asked her, snapping her out of her deep thoughts.

“How’s what?”

“The soap opera inside your head.”

Mark found the whole situation amusing and irritating at the same time. She could hardly blame him for that.

“Thinking about the drama in our lives actually helped with my headache, until you brought me back to reality.”

“Sorry,” he said, and meant it. He could feel some of her pain, quite literally, through their psychic connection.

“No, I’m sorry.” She closed her eyes. “I think I need a nap.” It wasn’t a good idea to nap with a concussion, if you were human, but she wasn’t.

“Sounds like a plan. Do you want me to sing you a lullaby?”

“I’ve heard you sing, Mark. No need to threaten me.”

“Heh.”

She lay back on her bed, and tried to let her exhaustion overcome the migraine. For a moment, it worked: she started drifting off, letting go…

“NO!”

The whole building shook with her denial.

“NO!”

Mark was holding her. “Christine!”

“I REMEMBER!” she screamed, just before oblivion consumed her.

Face-Off

Freedom Island, Caribbean Sea, July 5, 2014

I’d been through this before, but it wasn’t any easier the second time around.

“It’s not a coma this time,” Adam Slaughter-Trent told me for the fourth or fifth time. He was probably right – no, he was right – but it felt the same as before. Christine was lying in bed, unmoving, unconscious. At least they’d let me take her home. “Her vitals are normal; her Neo powers remain intact, and she’s healed off all the damage I wasn’t able to undo after the battle. Her brain activity is normal. She’s in a deep sleep, with heavy REM activity. She’s dreaming.”

“Whatever she remembered must have been so bad she couldn’t handle it,” I said. I couldn’t imagine what could do that to Christine. She’d faced stuff that would reduce most people to quivering jelly and kept on trucking.

“She’s shut me off completely, too,” I added. There was a psychic wall between us, and I couldn’t get through it.

Adam looked about as happy as I felt. The guy had always been a cold fish, but he cared as much for Christine as I did. “It looks like the overexertion of her powers awoke some repressed memories. My guess is that they relate to the time she was in a coma after the Genocide War.”

No shit. I kept the sarcastic remark to myself. Luckily for me, I didn’t have a face to betray what I was feeling.

“I’ll let her rest, then,” I said. I’d give her a few hours to rest, and if she was still out, I’d try to push past her mental blocks and get in there with her. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it would have to do.

We’d had four great months in a row. I’d been pretty sure the good times weren’t going to last forever. Still, it’s always surprising how quickly things can turn to shit.

“I’ll let you know as soon as she wakes up,” I promised Adam as I walked him to the door.

“Please do,” he said before I all but slammed the door on his face.

With nothing better to do, I went to the living room and looked for a book to read. Our new apartment was nicer and bigger than the one we got when we’d first moved to Freedom Island. Back then, housing had been at a premium. The Genocide War had opened up a lot of vacancies the hard way, though: we’d gotten a huge apartment right in Freedom Hall, right next to the other top dogs in the Legion. It’d belonged to notorious Legionnaire and even more notorious traitor Daedalus Smith, as a matter of fact. He wouldn’t be needing it anymore, now that he was missing and on the wanted list. We’d even kept most of his fancy furniture, after it’d been closely inspected for booby-traps and bugs.

We could have tossed it out and replaced it all, of course. Between the two of us we made more money than an A-list movie star. Well, she did. My merch deals were an order of magnitude smaller than hers. Her comic book was a best-seller; mine had been cancelled twice, once when I was presumed dead, and the second time when it turned out I wasn’t all that popular when I was alive, either. Her deal with Maybelline alone was worth more than all my endorsements combined. Not that either of us cared; the money didn’t feel real. We gave most of it away to assorted charities, and we still had enough to buy whatever we wanted. Neither of us had extravagant needs: books were cheap enough, even with the occasional signed first edition thrown in.

And the funny thing was, rich as we were, people kept giving us free stuff. Them as has, gits, as the saying went.

None of that mattered. I’d give it all away if I could have the old Christine back. Even when she woke up, she wouldn’t be the same person I’d met a year and a bit ago, and I had a bad feeling there were more changes in store for her.

We’d both changed. I still had nightmares about my stay in Mister Night’s version of Hell, among other things. She was having an even worse time. Sometimes she would freeze in the middle of whatever she was doing, when some bad memory or another decided to drop by for a visit, ruining her mood. I knew all about those episodes; I’d been having them for years. Killing and almost dying does that to you: you don’t get to go through those things unscathed, unless you’re a complete sociopath. Neos are more mentally resilient than most people, but the stuff doesn’t go away completely for us, either. It helps to keep busy and not wallow in it, of course. Having each other helped. A lot.

I took the book into the bedroom with me, and sat next to Christine’s sleeping form, where I could keep an eye on her.

At some point I dozed off.

And ended up back in Hell.

* * *

Black ruins reached out towards gray featureless skies.

I’d been there before.

No.

I was back in Hell. Or maybe I’d never left, maybe everything I’d thought had happened was a dream, an illusion, and I’d finally woken up. No Christine, no victory against Mister Night. Just Hell, scurrying through dead ruins while angry ghosts hunted me. For a moment I just stood there, unable to cope. I wanted to scream and cry, and claw at the ground until I dug a hole big enough to be buried in.

Fuck that.

You don’t let stuff steamroll you. You deal and you keep fighting until you die, and if you end up in Hell, you keep fighting. Maybe I was back in Mister Night’s psycho-world, but I’d managed to escape before. I’d do it again.

First things first. <Christine!>

Nothing. I concentrated on battering down the wall she’d put up between us.

<CHRISTINE!>

<Mark?>

She was there. I wasn’t alone. She was there.

<Hey.>

<What’s going on, Mark?>

<You tell me. You fainted, and I was keeping an eye out on you, and next thing I know I’m in my least favorite place in the known universe.>

<Oh, God. Wait, I’m headed your way.>

I could feel her presence now, getting closer to me. Soon enough, she appeared from behind a half-buried Statue of Liberty.

“Mark!” she called out to me, and we ran toward each other. There was some kissing and hugging, and a bit of crying. I don’t usually get emotional, but this was a justifiable exception, if I say so myself.

“Holy crap, I thought… I don’t know what I thought,” she finally said. She turned to the buried remains of the Statue. “Hey, it’s the final scene from Planet of the Apes!” I had no idea what she was talking about, but her chatter comforted me. “How long have I been here?”

“Eight hours at least. But if this place is anything like Mister Night’s stomping grounds, time doesn’t work the same here.”

“Yeah, I remember. I’ve been mostly crying and trying not to throw up. I wasn’t really paying attention to my surroundings until you called me.” She turned her face away from me. “I remember, Mark. I remember what happened to me after my brain broke, after we took Mister Night down.”

“Okay, that’s good.”

“No. Nothing about it is good.” She stepped away from me, and I let go of her. “You don’t know what happened to me. You don’t know what I did.”

“So tell me. Whatever it is, we’ll handle it.”

“I… I don’t want to.”

“And maybe I don’t want to hear it, either. What’s that got to do with anything?”

She let out something that was half laugh, half sob.

“Yeah, what’s that got to do with anything?” Her nod ended in a shudder.

“Okay Mark. This is Dreamland, so I don’t have to tell you. I’ll show you.”

Chapter Two

Christine Dark

Across the Universe(s), February 7, 2014

Falling, falling through the world, and hasn’t she done this before? Why couldn’t she just stay put? Why couldn’t she be normal and get off this crazy rollercoaster of an existence?

Darkness. It was pitch black, but she wasn’t unconscious, and she could tell there were things out in the shadows. Something wicked going bump in a night that was dark and full of terrors.

I’m in the place between places, where teleports go when moving around. That bit of knowledge helped a little, but not enough. She still had to deal with the fact that she had no body. She was astral-traveling, and she didn’t like it one bit.

You have to die.

Seriously? Him again?

You saved the world. Your work is finished. All you can do now is become a new threat.

She should have known that the little creep known as the First would be hanging around, ready to pounce on her. The monstrous man-child saw himself as the guardian of the Source, the alien artifact that gave Neos their powers, and had decided that she was too dangerous to be allowed to live.

You almost helped destroy the planet, you d-bag! If you’d killed me, the Genocide would have shredded the Earth! And now you’re trying again?

That was a mistake, the creepy child-thing admitted. But that threat is gone. You still remain, a mortal danger to the world.

She could feel his presence in the darkness. He was trying to sever her soul from her body, taking advantage of her weakened state.

I don’t want to do this. But she had to. She gathered her will, feeling power coursing through her disembodied persona, and struck before the First could complete his own attack.

No! I have to…

Christine felt the First die. His whole life flashed before her eyes, a century of fear and loneliness, of knowledge without wisdom, of power without purpose. All he did was sit in his little hidey-hole in the Pripet Marshes, formulating plans that went nowhere. He never helped anybody, except when his sister, the young woman who would become Baba Yaga, came to him and forced him to teach her how to control and master her powers. She went forth to use her gifts as the Witch of Pinsk, the terror of the marshes. He stayed in the wilderness, waiting for orders from the Source, orders that never came. He watched and did nothing, and when his chance to act came, he lashed out in fear and tried to kill Christine. Not once, not twice, but three times. He would never stop trying. She had no choice.

She snuffed him out, for good this time.

She’d killed before, but this felt worse somehow. More cold-blooded, deliberate.

No time to mourn. She had to go back to her body, assuming it was still alive. She had felt something break inside her before she fell into this dark place. She wasn’t sure she could find her way back.

But the First had left a psychic trail behind when he came after her. Maybe she could follow it home.

It took a big effort, but after some time concentrating she found the First’s mental footprints. Christine rushed after them, feeling they were fading away. It was like swimming upstream, but she kept pushing through it. Light in many colors emerged from the darkness, forming a gateway of sorts, and she darted through it. She was home!

She wasn’t home.

Her disembodied self was floating over Freedom Island. She recognized the outline, having flown over it many times in the last few months. Except something terrible had happened to it. All the buildings had been completely destroyed; only piles of rubble remained. Where Freedom Hall should stand, there was nothing but a charred crater, filled with water. The city had been consumed by fire. Every statue had been deliberately ground to dust. Someone with enormous power and equal levels of sheer malevolence had been at work, making sure nothing remained standing.

And the damage was old, years old at least. Patches of vegetation had overgrown many of the ruins.

Worst of all, the island and the surrounding ocean were lifeless; the overgrown foliage was brown and dead. Nothing was alive down there, down to the bacterial and viral levels. The whole area had been sterilized.

Something moved within the dead waters around the island, however. Masses of purple-black darkness pulsed back and forth like misshapen beating hearts, busily transforming the world into a place fitting for their creators.

She wasn’t home.

Dreamland, July 5, 2014

“You were…” Mark said.

She nodded. “The First screwed me again. I have to give it to him, he’d prepared for everything. Just in case he couldn’t kill me himself, he took a side trip to my least-favorite alternate universe, the Darkest Timeline, so to speak. The world where I went evil and destroyed everything. So when I followed his trail I ended up there. As a ghost.”

“That fucking asshole. We should have risked a trip to the Pripet Marshes to take him out long before this.”

“Well, he’s dead now. I don’t even feel as bad about it as I should. If he’d tried to help me instead of murder me, all of this could have been avoided.”

“And killing him isn’t the only thing that’s bothering you.”

She lowered her head. Showing him what happened after she arrived to Earth Shitty – or Earth FUBAR, Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition, as Mark liked to call it – was going to be hard. But he deserved to know. Deserved to know what depths she’d sunk into, the things she’d done.

Even if that meant he stopped loving her.

“Things got a lot worse.”

The Freedom Legion

Freedom Island, Caribbean Sea, July 5, 2014

“Twenty-nine dead and seventeen wounded,” Adam said, concluding the briefing. “It’s a miracle the death toll wasn’t worse, considering we were dealing with a possible Type Four Neolympian on a rampage.”

Ali Fiori, a.k.a. Hyperia, nodded in agreement. She’d barely survived the fight with that nut. It’d been almost as bad as fighting the Genocide. If the Legion hadn’t been right there, New York would have gotten pasted.

She frowned. No, that wasn’t really true, was it?

“The miracle’s name is Dark Justice,” she said. “If she hadn’t taken him out, no way we could have stopped that crazy bastard from turning Brooklyn and maybe the other boroughs into a disaster zone.’

It was Adam’s turn to nod. “You are correct.”

“She took out a possible Type Four with one shot,” the Faerie Godfather said. “That’s more than a little badass. That’s scary badass.”

 Everybody in the Legion Council reflected on that. As usual, the four members of the Pacific Headquarters were present in spirit, via holographic avatars. The Atlantic slate – Adam, Ali, the Faerie Godfather and Artemis – looked slightly gloomier than the holograms of General Xu, Tigresa, Fox Ghost and Musashi. Probably because they’d had front-row seats to the battle in question. But everyone was worried about Christine’s awe-inspiring display of raw power.

“How is she?” Fox Ghost asked.

“Still unconscious. Face-Off is watching her and will let us know when she wakes up.”

Adam’s words didn’t improve the Council’s mood.

“She’s extremely dangerous,” Musashi said, ignoring the sidelong look from Fox Ghost. It was kind of funny, but the Japanese-American and the Japanese Councilors cordially detested one another. That was probably because Musashi considered Fox Ghost to be only slightly better than a gaijin and treated him accordingly. The politics resulting in electing a Japanese Legionnaire to the Council had been downright byzantine: Japan remained a semi-pariah in international relations, an economic satellite of the Republic of China that was regarded with little love by the rest of Asia. People didn’t let their grudges go easily in those cultures, and Japan’s behavior during World War Two hadn’t been forgotten. Still, Musashi had managed to win over enough Legionnaires to get elected to the Council in the aftermath of the Genocide War. Since then, he’d tried to position himself as the conscience of the Legion, a role previously held by the Peruvian hero Chasca.

Chasca was a self-righteous pain in the ass, but I kind of miss her, Ali thought. And unlike Musashi, Chasca hadn’t postured to score points off people.

“The Council needs to ensure such power isn’t misused,” Musashi went on.

“We just heard that without her, New York would have been destroyed,” Hiroshi ‘Fox Ghost’ Tanaka replied, not missing a chance to correct the Japanese Councilor. “She’s fine, Mush. She’s saved our collective bacon multiple times in under a year. I think she’s earned our trust.”

  “Trust, but verify,” Tigresa said, her big purple eyes looking languidly through her long lashes. The Argentinean heroine looked like the supermodel and telenovela star she’d been before she gained superpowers, but her brains were her biggest asset, being a Genius-Type Neo with a few hundred patents under her belt. “I’m sure Doctor Slaughter-Trent has things under control, however.”

Adam dipped his head in acknowledgement. “We are being careful. As a member of Squad One, Christine is surrounded by the most powerful Legion members of the Atlantic contingent. We are always close at hand, and keeping a close eye on her.”

“Yes,” General Xu said, sounding anything but agreeable. “But Squad One includes a close relative, her current lover, and her former lover. Not exactly a recipe for impartiality, without meaning any offense towards you, Doctor.”

“No offense taken,” Adam said. “I understand all of your concerns, and I assure you, if any of us thought we wouldn’t do whatever was necessary, we would recuse ourselves.”

Neither Xu nor Musashi looked convinced, but they kept their misgivings to themselves.

For now.

Being a Councilor was a royal pain in the ass, Ali thought for the umpteenth time. She’d been in the Legion for decades without ever feeling the least bit tempted to campaign for the job. Then Doc Slaughter – before he’d gotten himself killed and then recombined into the new and improved Doc Slaughter-Trent – had all but shanghaied her for the job, the bastard, and she’d managed to turn her temporary slot into an official one in the last election. Ali hated politics, but she had quickly realized that the Council needed a few members who hated politics, just to keep it honest.

“Moving on,” she said pointedly, and nobody argued with her. “This rampage is further proof the Source is creating new parahumans once again. The rate at which it’s doing so remains slower than it was before Christine interfaced with it, so we have some time to come to grips with the problem, fortunately.”

“Especially since over a thousand Neos died in the Genocide War,” Olivia O’Brien, a.k.a. Artemis, said in a somber voice. Her husband had been one of those casualties, and she wasn’t done grieving.

None of them were. They had taken unprecedented losses during that terrible day in Jupiter’s orbit. The Legion had lost over thirty percent of their members, unsurprisingly, since they’d been in the front lines of two brutal battles, one against the Genocide, the other against hordes of Outsider entities, hostile aliens who had been behind much of the mayhem of the past twelve months.

“Yes,” Ali went on. “Still, we need to increase our efforts to identify and reach out to those new Neos. We could use the new blood, not to mention keep them out of trouble.”

“As long as they don’t go ‘batshit crazy’ right off the bat, as Christine would say,” Hiroshi replied. “Hell, a Neo has to be crazy to turn to crime.”

“Pretty much,” Ali agreed. Even a weak Neolympian could write his own ticket nowadays, without breaking a single law. Unfortunately, there were some who couldn’t handle the sudden infusion of power, like the still-unidentified bastard Christine put down the day before.

“I’d suggest tasking two additional squads to step up recruitment efforts with civilian support,” Adam said. “And a commensurate increase in the budget.” He went on to tally the actual dollar amounts, and Ali saw a few members frown at the numbers. The Legion’s budget was still recovering from a double whammy. The Genocide War had been incredibly costly in resources as well as lives, for one. Worse still, Daedalus Smith’s treachery had cost the Legion billions in lost revenues and massive legal fees. Fixing that mess would take years, if not decades. All of which meant the Legion was strapped for cash. But reaching out to new Neos was worth the expense.

“A motion is on the floor.” It was quickly seconded and voted on. And unanimously approved, for a change.

“Anybody have anything not on the agenda?” Nobody did. “Well, then, meeting adjourned. Go smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.”

She needed a break.

She needed to see John.

* * *

Ali found the Invincible Man wearing civvies and plopped down in front of the boob tube, looking like a buffed and rugged version of a ‘50s sitcom father figure. She glanced at the TV screen. Casablanca was playing. He’d been watching that black-and-white flick at least once a week, which was driving her crazy. It was a good film, but it wasn’t that good.

He’s still sore about it, she thought bitterly. Still sore about losing little Miss Christine. And, unlike Bogie, he hadn’t given her up; she’d outright dumped him.

Ali didn’t really dislike Christine Dark, although her chattiness got on her nerves after a while. She had grown to resent the little redhead, however.  She could see why John had been attracted to her – her resemblance to Linda Lamar, John’s dearly departed beloved, was explanation enough – but she still didn’t understand why he’d fallen so hard for her.

John looked up as she walked through the door and got to his feet to give her a brief hug and a peck on the cheek. They’d been together for a good three months and change, but theirs wasn’t exactly a love story for the ages. More like, what did the kids call it nowadays? Friends with benefits. Fuck-buddies. Maybe a bit more than that, but not much.

Rebound. You knew that’s what this was from the get-go, Ali told herself as they sat down on the couch.

“Anything important happen at the meeting?” John asked her lightly, switching Casablanca off, to Ali’s relief. He’d been in the Council for decades, but hadn’t even bothered to run for the job this time around. Probably for the best, all things considered. He might have actually lost.

“Nothing much. We’re shifting more money into recruitment; that’s about it.”

He didn’t bring Christine up, and neither did she.

“Want to go grab some dinner? Or I can microwave something,” Ali went on. Neither of them could cook worth a damn.

John thought about it for a moment. “Sure, why not? Let me grab a jacket.” John wouldn’t be caught dead outdoors in shirtsleeves, despite the fact that no earthly weather pattern, including tsunamis and volcanic eruptions, could affect him in any way. Not to mention the fact that most people didn’t wear jackets for a casual dinner, not for a few decades.

You knew he was old-fashioned. Downright old, as a matter of fact. Then again, you’re pushing sixty yourself, woman!

It was different, somehow. Her formative years had happened during the seventies and eighties, with color TV, computer terminals, and wrist-comms. He’d grown up with pre-Golden Age technology, in an era where horses were still in wide use for work and transportation, and home radio sets had been a major innovation. His had been a completely different world. That still came out in surprising ways, every once in a while.

And none of that would matter if we were a real couple, instead of two people using each other.

They made their way to La Casa Del Rey, a five-star Spanish restaurant on one of the terraces in Freedom Hall. The cuisine and ambiance were excellent, but her mood didn’t let her enjoy either.

It was too funny. The comics had put her and John together dozens of times. It was a natural coupling, the Invincible Man and the World’s Strongest Girl. Never mind that John had been married to a normal woman for a good seventy years and had never even considered being with anybody else, or that Ali had spent much of her adult life with Jason Merrill, a.k.a. Mesmer. If it made for a good feature, the comics threw it out there, with a small-print disclaimer that the story was fictional and not meant to describe actual people or events.

And now, the fictional mating had become real. Somewhat. And really unsatisfying.

“You’re upset,” John said while they waited for the main course.

“Did you get with me to get back at Christine?” There. Cards on the table.

“Do you really think I could be that petty?”

“Normally, no.”

His expression turned sullen, mulish. “I’ve got a clean bill of health, Ali. No tainted implants, no tele-empathic manipulation, no demonic possession. This is me. Nobody else. Me.”

“Then why does it feel like you’re not here half of the time? I caught the glare you were giving Christine during the Independence Day ceremony. You still haven’t gotten over her.”

For a moment it looked like he was about to lose his temper, just like he had during those bad years when they’d all feared he was going insane. But then he exhaled and slumped in his chair.

“All right, Ali,” he said. “Yes, I resent being thrown by the wayside and passed over for some vigilante who kills people without a second thought. It’s a terribly bad choice for anybody, let alone someone like Christine, who has more power than you or I have ever possessed. If she picks up his bad habits, she’ll become as great a threat as the Genocide. We know for a fact that in an alternate timeline she did just that, and Face-Off played a big role in it. So, yeah, I’m hurt and jealous, but my concerns go beyond my bruised ego.”

“But the bruised ego is there.”

“I won’t deny it. I let her get close, Ali. Closer than anybody since Linda, and in some ways closer than Linda and I ever were.” He looked embarrassed as he spoke. “This is ridiculous. I’m over a hundred years old, not some hormonal adolescent.”

“We’re old, John, but a lot of what passes for the wisdom of age is merely fear and diminished capacity. We Neos are eternally young, so we get to be eternal teenagers.”

John grinned bitterly. “Eternal emotionally-stunted, immature, overgrown children.”

“And Christine is really young, John. You two were never going to be a good match, not right now anyway. Maybe when she’s a hundred and twenty and you’re two hundred, you’ll have more in common.”

“And meanwhile…”

“Meanwhile you got me. As long as you don’t treat me like some twinkie you picked up at a convention.”

“Ali… You deserve better than what I can give you.”

“You forget I’ve been around the block a few times, buddy. I won’t say I don’t believe in love, but I know you can’t hold your breath waiting for it. Right now, dating you suits me. And the sex is great.”

He blushed. Old-fashioned, and old.

“Just stop brooding over her,” she went on. “You deserve better than what she’s got for you.”

“Point.”

“So let’s skip dessert, and we can spend some quality time back home.”

“It’s a date.”

* * *

“I just can’t forgive her,” he said as they lay in bed together and she was beginning to drift off.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Just can’t.”

Ali really didn’t want to get into it again, not after the last couple of very enjoyable hours. “How about you give it the old college try, hmm?”

“I will.”

“Good.”

If she noticed he was staring into the darkness as she fell asleep, she forgot about it in the morning.

Christine Dark

Earth FUBAR, Day One

She didn’t stay a ghost for very long. Her viewpoint shifted wildly, swiftly, and next thing she knew she was looking through a stranger’s eyes.

WTF?

 She was lying on something hard. Bleachers. People were everywhere, shouting and cheering. Christine stared up at the sky, somewhere outdoorsy and a bit cold. A teenage dude wearing some sort of school uniform was kneeling over her, sobbing uncontrollably. “Nellie! Oh, Nellie, no!” The cheering crowd all around them made it hard to hear him.

WTF?

Christine blinked and looked down; she was wearing a school uniform herself, and it looked vaguely familiar. Gray blazer, darker gray skirt, long socks. As she craned her head up, she caught a glimpse of a figure on a frakking flying broomstick soaring across the sky. Others followed it.

 No effing way.

“Nellie?”

The guy stopped crying; he hugged her tightly enough to hurt. “Nellie! You’re alive!” he shouted in her ear.

She lost track of the kids on the flying broomsticks as she tried to disentangle herself from him. Her hair was in pigtails, and it was dark brown, she discovered as she shook her head. She was in an honest-to-goodness Quid… No effing way. She’d died and gone to Hog...

No. Not really. This is my evil twin’s version of the game, of the novels. I’m a fan of the books, so she is a fan of the books. And now she’s making her slaves play the game for her amusement.

The crowd kept cheering. Christine managed to take a peek over the guy’s shoulder. The broomstick fliers were shooting energy blasts at each other, which she was pretty sure wasn’t in the game’s official rules.

“I saw you collapse when that stray bolt hit you. I couldn’t find a pulse!” the guy went on, still hugging her. He had to shout to make himself heard over the roar of the crowd.

“I’m okay now,” she said, ignoring his babbling and pushing him away. She had to see what was happening, to process where she was. Who she was.

He finally let her go and she looked up just in time to see one of the broomstick riders burst into flames. Pieces of broomstick and pilot scattered in every direction and the crowd went wild. Definitely not how the game was supposed to be played. Except maybe in Hell’s version of J.K.’s beloved novels. Which was a good description of this place.

Trapped. I’m trapped here in the body of some poor girl who just got killed.

Keep the panic down to a dull roar and use what passes for your wits, her brain suggested.

Sure, why not. What’s the worst thing that can happen next?

She was afraid she was going to find out, and sooner rather than later.

Christine stood up, ignoring the grumbles of the people behind her, and looked around. Her new body was fairly tall, about five nine or so in her sensible schoolgirl shoes, and she could see they were in some sort of coliseum. There were some shallow hills out in the distance, but no other major terrain features.

Her evil counterpart’s words came back to her: “I’ve got a little preserve set up in Kansas.” That must be where she was.

This may be Kansas, Toto, but I bet it’s not what Kansas used to be.

“Can we go somewhere else?” she asked the boy. “Please?”

He looked at her as if she’d lost her mind.

“You know we can’t leave until the game is over! Do you want to get sent to the Goddess?”

He tilted his head toward the boxed seats on the other side of the arena. One of the tiny figures there had a mane of shiny red hair, and was dressed all in black. Christine gulped. What if her evil double could detect her presence?

She set that thought aside. There were plenty of other things to worry about. Like making sure her new friend didn’t find out she was a body-snatcher.

“Sorry,” she said. “Something is wrong with me. I can’t remember anything. I can’t remember your name, or my name, or anything.”

When in doubt, pretend to have amnesia. Easy way to excuse your ignorance of current events, local mores, and whatever the eff was going on. And much more believable and convenient than the truth, which might get her and everyone around her in trouble. As in tortured-to-death trouble.

“That wand-blast fried your brain,” the boy said. “Poor Nellie! How are you going to survive without your memories?”

“With a little help from my friends, I hope.”

“I’ll help you, of course I’ll help you! My name is Robinson, Robinson Grace. You always call me Robb, from those books you love.”

“And my name is Nellie, I take it.”

“Yes. Nellie Gomez. Your…” He stopped mid-sentence and started cheering loudly when another flier took a dive into the ground. He’d been moving so fast he splashed on impact, and she turned her head from the grisly sight.

“Come on!” Robb told her. “If the Watchers notice you’re not cheering, you’re going to get in trouble!”

Christine faux-cheered, noticing that the big smiles among the people around her were mostly fake, except for a small but distinct minority that was actually enjoying watching people getting killed for their entertainment. She picked that up through her empathy, which was up but much weaker than normal. She also spotted a number of men and women standing by the exits. They wore a combination of hooded robes and body armor, their chests plates decorated with a red staring eye logo anybody who read Tolkien would recognize.

And those are the Watchers, wearing the Eye of Sauron and making sure we enjoy a bout of Harry Potter’s favorite’s sport, played with rules out of the Hunger Games. The dark side of Geekdom.

“Good,” Robb said. “As long as you go along, you’ll be okay. At least in this game we mostly just watch and cheer.” He stopped again for more cheering as someone scored. “Except for the stray magic bolts hitting us.”

“Lovely.”

“I’ll help you, Nellie. I’ll tell you the rules, show you how things work.”

“Thank you.”

He blushed a bit. “And, uh, then we can go somewhere and, you know, like we always do.”

And now he’s lying through his teeth.

Her empathy might be working at a very low ebb, but it was enough to know he wasn’t telling the truth. Robb was hot for Nellie, but it was pretty clear she didn’t reciprocate his feelings. Nellie had friend-zoned the poor guy. What kind of person had she been before she’d died? Christine didn’t think she’d be around long enough to find out.

“We’ll see,” she said, and by his crestfallen expression that wasn’t the first time he’d heard those words.

* * *

The game ended about fifteen minutes and a dozen more fatalities later, said fatalities evenly split between players and spectators. Christine felt sick. She’d seen plenty of death since her arrival to Earth Alpha, but nothing so cruelly needless as this. Even worse, the crowd kept cheering through all of it. By the time it was over, only a handful of survivors remained, all belonging to the winning team. After the lucky contestants left, it was the Goddess’ turn to put on her own show. Her glowing figure emerged from the VIP section and flew over the corpse-littered field.

“Village People!” she called out, her voice superhumanly loud. “That was fun! You are free to go home and do whatevs. Starting tomorrow, we’re changing games. It’s going to be American Gladiators time. Lots of gratuitous violence, and maybe a little sex, brought to you by yours truly. What do you say to that?”

The crowd chanted in unison.

“WE LOVE YOU, CHRISTINE! WE LOVE YOU LONG TIME!”

“That’s what I want to hear.”

This was Hell.

It was a long walk from the coliseum to the town where Robb and Nellie lived. They walked past cultivated fields, following a country highway, its paved surface marred by dozens of gravel-filled potholes. Once, a car went down the road, forcing people to give way. Four hooded figures were inside, glancing coldly at the pedestrian plebes. More Watchers.

The whole thing looks like a low-budget post-apocalyptic message movie.

Robb wasn’t very talkative during the walk home. “Not here,” he whispered to her, indicating the people all around them. “You never know who reports to the Watchers.”

So they marched in silence, along with three hundred or so people dressed up as students for that pseudo-LARP session. They were mostly young, ranging from nine and ten-year olds up to late teens and early twenties, about evenly divided in gender. A few older men and women were dressed like teachers; some of them were on the verge of tears, the ones who didn’t have a thousand yard stare. The younger ones seemed less emotional, more jaded; a few were even talking about the game as if watching those kids getting killed had been fun.

How long since my worst half took over? If it’s been years, then this is all they know. What’s that saying Mark told me? You can get used to hanging, if you hang long enough. Father Alex was fond of that phrase: it sort of works as a brief description of Russia’s history. Mongols and boyars and commissars: you can get used to anything, if it lasts long enough.

It was depressing as eff.

Walking in silence gave her a chance to get a feel for her new body. Nellie was fit and strong, and from the callouses on her hands and the soles of her feet, she spent a lot of time up and about, working with said hands; from her tanned skin most of it happened outdoors. That was true of most of the ersatz students around her. Farmers, living off the land. They probably had to turn over half their crops or more to the Goddess and her minions. Not that she needed minions. Dark Christine could kill anyone, everyone, whenever she felt like it. The only thing keeping those people alive was the fact she’d get bored without living toys to play with.

How can people live like this?

And yet live they did. A few boys and girls were holding hands while walking. She noticed one of the older girls was a good seven months pregnant. People got on with their lives as best they could.

I’m going to set you free, all of you, Christine promised. She pictured herself leading the oppressed masses, charging the Goddess’ palace, and putting a boot up her nasty ass. The survivors might inherit a world in ruins, but it would be their world, to do with as they chose. Or, if the planet was just too messed up to live in, she could bring them to Earth Alpha.

Maybe things wouldn’t be as easy as all that, but she wasn’t going to abandon those people to the tender mercies of Dark Christine. Not when she bore some responsibility for it. Or felt she did, at least.

Of course, doing anything would be a lot easier if she had her kewl powerz at her disposal. She’d been able to do an empathic reading on Robb, but she had to concentrate and focus on him. As they walked, she tried her empathy on other people, and found she could pick up general emotions easily, and get a decent aura read with some work, much like when she’d first developed her powers on Earth Alpha.

During those trial scans, she discovered something particularly disturbing. Quite few of the auras she examined were tainted with Outsider stuff. The Taint showed up as little barnacles of oozing black matter, barnacles that would grow with every act of hatred and malice their bearer committed. She repressed a shudder.

The Outsiders, the survivors among the inhabitants of whatever had existed before the Big Bang and inflation replaced it with the current universe, were nasty monsters that thrived on hatred. Their energy could disrupt Neo powers. It could also corrupt human souls, although that required some degree of cooperation from the corrupted. To have your aura tainted, you had to do some evil stuff, or embrace the hatred for everything the entities demanded. Nasty, nasty stuff.

She remembered the masses of Outsider stuff in the oceans. The whole planet was being corrupted. At some point, it would become a hospitable place for the Big Bads themselves, and then calling it Hell would be an understatement.

Okay, deal with that later. Limited empathy, check.

Moving on. Walking was as much fun as walking had ever been, back when she was human. She wasn’t getting tired as fast as she used to, but that was because her Nellie-body was in good shape. Her feet hurt; she didn’t have a Neo’s strength and resistance to fatigue. As a Neo, she could jog a two-minute mile without breaking a sweat. In her current state, she might manage an eight-minute mile, and she’d be feeling every step and breath along the way.

The proportional strength of a Kansas farm girl, check.

No telekinesis or energy shields; subtle attempts to activate both produced no effects. Why? Maybe being there only as a mental projection means most of her powers got left behind. Or maybe it would take time for those abilities to manifest themselves. When her uncle Adam got his new body, it took a couple of days before his Neo abilities came back. Would that happen to her here? Would being in another universe affect her access to the Source?

If I don’t get my powers back, it’s going to be pretty hard to lead a peasant’s rebellion against the tyranny of my very, very powerful Dark Half.

There was something else she had, though. Her Words. Power. Crush/Rend (two separate words that somehow fit each other like the halves of a Yin and Yang symbol). Heal. See. And Dim, although she still was having problems with it. Those little hacks in reality’s programming could come in handy. On the other hand, using them might alert Dark Christine about her presence. If she was found out, things would get very ugly, very fast.

She was alone in a strange, dangerous world.

Been there, done that, she told herself. It didn’t make her feel any better.

Hunters and Hunted

Brooklyn, New York, July 6, 2014

The recently deceased Neo was eventually identified as one Maxwell Henderssen of Queens. The press had quickly anointed him as Molten Max. There was a flurry of human interest stories about Molten Max’s life before the five minutes during which he’d become something more than a chronically unemployed loser with a long rap sheet. His celebrity status lasted for a whole week, after which he was gone and mostly forgotten, immortalized only as one more entry in the Encyclopedia Neotica.

The battle site would remain an open sore in the neighborhood for longer than that. The bodies of all twenty-nine victims had been recovered, evidence collected, the living evacuated. The ruins were unstable and dangerous, and it would take a few days for work crews to begin repairing the damage. Police barriers blocked the streets, and a couple of patrol cars were on watch to keep people from wandering among the ruins and breaking their fool necks.

There weren’t enough cops on watch to form a secure cordon around the area, however, especially at night, and a group of enterprising young men took advantage of that. Lou Perez had worked in one of the chop shops in the neighborhood, before he’d screwed up once too many times and gotten his ass fired. He knew the shop had contained a wall safe full of cash, and also knew the combination to said safe. Now that the chop shop’s owner had been sent to Jesus by Molten Max, it’d be child’s play to get to it and make bank.

Lou had recruited his cousins Felipe and Mario to help him. The trio had snuck past the police cordon and skulked toward his former place of employment. That turned out to be tougher than Lou had thought. The power was off, so it was dark as hell in there. Even worse, the streets had been so thoroughly rearranged by the Neo battle that it took him a while to figure out where to go. As it turned out, about half of the chop shop was gone, swallowed by a massive crater that filled most of a city block. Luckily the safe was in the half that was still standing.

“Here it is,” Lou said, using a small flashlight to find his way. The wall safe seemed to be in pristine condition. Lou couldn’t believe his luck. Normally, all his plans turned to shit in short order.

He tried the combination he’d memorized from a strip of paper the owner kept at his desk, the fucking idiot. The safe clicked open.

“Fucking-A.”

It all seemed too good to be true, but the safe door swung open and Lou found himself looking at a dream come true: there were fat stacks of fifties and hundreds, bound neatly with elastic bands; some rare Dominion rayguns, easily worth ten grand each; and a small stash of coke and Ultra-Drops. That was a hundred, maybe two hundred grand score, and even split three ways it was the most money he’d ever had.

It was the happiest day of his life.

“All right, let’s pack up this bitch and get going,” he said. He was the luckiest sumbitch that ever lived, he thought.

Lou and his cousins were so busy filling their backpacks with loot that they completely missed the light show at the bottom of the crater.

A small sphere, glowing red and purple, took form out of thin air, sparkled merrily for a few seconds, and dissipated as suddenly as it had arrived, leaving behind a human form.

“That’s it,” Lou said, zipping up his backpack after taking one last loving look at the money inside. He wanted to laugh like a loon. “Let’s get…”

“Your clothes. Give them to me, now.”

“What the fuck?” Lou and his cousins turned around and found themselves facing a short red-haired girl. A short, totally naked red-haired girl.

“Nice night for a walk,” the naked girl said; her voice had a harsh accent and tone, like she was trying to sound like a man, and some sort of foreigner at that.

“Yeah, sure, lady,” Lou said with a placating grin while he tried to reach the Dominion blaster he’d stuck into his waistband. Someone crazy enough to wander around naked had a to be a Neo; his only hope was to put a plasma bolt in her head and scram before the cops could come check on the noise.

“No, no,” the crazy bitch went on. “You’re supposed to say ‘Fuck you asshole’ and pull out a switchblade. Fucking shitty alternate reality without Terminator movies.”

“Fuck you, asshole!” Lou shouted, leveling the energy pistol at her. He pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

“A little bit of telekinesis,” the girl said. “Trigger don’t work so good no more. Bummer. But thanks for playing.”

“Oh, shit.”

“That’s Dark Justice!” cousin Felipe said, recognizing her face. “We’re fucked!”

“Close, but no cigar,” the crazy naked girl said. “But you’re half right. You are fucked.”

It turned out to be the worst night in Lou’s life, as well as his last.

* * *

One of the Three Dead Amigos had been wearing a leather jacket, barely long enough to serve as a mini-dress once she zipped it up and tied a belt around her waist. The rest of their clothes had been ruined by all the blood and other less appetizing bodily fluids they’d spewed while she rearranged their insides. She probably should have killed them a bit more cleanly, but she’d been in a killing mood.

She giggled. She was always in a killing mood.

“Okay, Pissy Chrissy,” she muttered. “This may be your world, but as it turns out, you’re only living in it.”

She took to the air and was gone before the first cops arrived to the scene.