On patrol

Been flying patrols in Pinnacle City with Skye, the last couple of weeks. Skye has those natural pteradactyl wings and a fair level of telekinesis, which she uses to boost her flying speed, as well help her aim with throwing weapons. I think her favorite weapon is a short recurve bow she carries a lot. Looks a lot like one of those Turkish or Indian bows, and throws an arrow a good distance. With a little help, she can double the range.

Skye loves flying over the city. This time of year, there are updrafts and crosswinds, and she can glide a long, long time.

Couple of nights ago, we caught a burglar climbing the Bank of Saratoga Building. He had a suit with weird silicone gloves and boots, with a pleated texture that acts like suction cups. The design is based on wall-crawling lizards, like geckos, we learned later. He was sweating and straining, slipping down the glass every so often, I don't think he factored in how much work it is to actually climb a sheer face, in summer heat. I think he was kind of relieved when we plucked him off the wall and flew him to the county jail.

Looks like the super-villains are on holiday, around here. Checked in with Legacy, they've got some reports of activity from Deathknell's crew. Dire Wolf joined up with them for a few months, but he and Deathknell seem to have butted heads once too often. Last I saw, Dire Wolf was somewhere on the east coast, causing trouble for the Valiants.

Ah, well, Skye's taking me out to dinner. Maybe something will come up tonight.

Nothing much to report...

...sigh...

Well, I'm on probation with Legacy. There's this whole thing about checking in after any kind of extra-dimensional abduction and I didn't.

Spent a little time on the west coast with the Guardians. Helped them pack up their offices. Centurion's moving his operations to Texas and the Guardians are getting their own new HQ north of Fort Worth. They flew out yesterday and I headed back to Pinnacle City.

The quarters here, at Legacy are a little cramped, but I haven't had much time to find a new place, or see about rebuilding. Spent a few hours skimming the action reports for the time I've been away. I missed a small alien invasion, something called the Kh'yot Hegemony tried to lay claim to the Solar System. Earth's heroes and a Noerian Peace-keeping Force detachment drove them off. The Noerians have really stepped up, since the Overguards were wiped out. I've only met the one Noerian, Ragnar, and as I understand it, he's something of a throwback who likes adventure and action. From what I've read, they're into oneness with the universe and such. Big in the "soft" psi powers, like telepathy, and such, but those are a pretty decent advantage when you're sniffing out trouble spots. Add to that, technology that makes Star Trek look like Gunsmoke.

Yoiks! The Elysian girls want to go out on patrol. They want me to be their guide around Pinnacle City, but I dunno how much good I'll do, having been gone so long. Still, it's always fun to hang out with those two, Mysti's glittery pseudo-magicks can come in handy with apprehending bad guys and Skye's got wings and, well, I have a thing for winged women. Gonna head out, now.

Gladiators....

A year! A bloody, damned year!
I never worked out the exact ratio, but time runs screwy in some realities. In this case, it seems to be almost 2 to 1, becuase I was in their world for almost 2 full years, this time.

Yeah, I finally made it back. I was getting set to get my life back in order, when I posted, last and then I had a visit from my friends, the Guardians, who'd come to town investigating my disappearance. I'm busy explaining to them how I come to have a 1940s haircut and costume, etc, when there's a shudder and a flash of light, and then my house was sliding down a hill.

My costume reconfigured for the period....


My new house! Well, new-ish. I hadn't had a chance to get it all broken in, yet. I hadn't performed the territory marking rite or anything!

Everyone made it to the party except Centurion. He was on a test run with a new suit of armor. These are the Guardians who came along for the ride...


Everybody makes it out of the house without too much trouble, but now my house is at the bottom of the hill. Then I noticed that, while it's the same hillside, it ain't MY hill. It's just dawning on me that we're in a parallel reality, when the Futurist's funky airship appears over the treeline. He'd brought me back, and with me, Mega, Cassandra, Wildstar, Virago, and Tesla, from the Guardians. And their jump-jet. And my freakin' house! The jump-jet was intact, but my house was a wreck.

Mega gets the jet in the air, he's not happy about what's happened and he's not willing to ride with the guy who shanhai-ed us. I go on the airship with the Futurist. Wildstar and Virago are with me, relaying things back to the others in the jet. There are some gladiators onboard, so I make introductions. Mystere and Hawk are there, along with Hurricane and Liberator, as well as Golden Star and Magneton. The Futurist seemed a bit...taxed. I guess he strained something, pulling so much mass through.

So, here's what I never got a chance to post, about the first time I was brought here.

I helped the Arsenal of Democracy and the Allied Gladiators push the Japanese out of Mexico, where they'd established themselves in late 1943. They had held on, against the Allies for this long, only because of the Axis supers were holding back the Arsenal. What's more, in the last few months, they had begun construction of the secret weapon that had allowed the Axis to take over Europe and most of Asia.

The device, a set of seven antenna masts supporting rings of field coils and other electronic gear, generates an energy field that makes people violently nauseous and repels gladiators. For supers from my world, it just causes a vague uneasiness, which is why they brought me over. I helped take it down and helped with fighting to Axis supers. We managed to drive them out of the Americas and when they sent me home, we thought they had the momentum to finish the war.

But, it turned out, there was more than one of those mysterious secret weapon towers. They had been building them around the world, and there was more to them that simply repelling people with super-powers. The energy from the apparatus was meant to allow an ancient Lovecraft-style Elder God to enter and survive in this universe. The realm they inhabit is many times more dimensionally complex than the human planes. Normally, they cannot enter the human planes without boiling away to nothingness.

According to Mystere, there is a legend of one of these things entering a human plane simply to commit suicide, which destroyed the universe it entered and caused a hyper-dimensional shock wave that damaged dozens of parallels in close dimensional proximity to the destroyed universe. Scary stuff. And the freaking Nazis were trying to bring one here. Great.

Still, we had an advantage. We had myself and the Guardians, who were less vulnerable to the energies from the containment towers. We had speed on our side, with the Guardians' jump jet and Wildstar's and Virago's speed.



First order of business was to locate the incursion points. With Mystere's magics and lore, we knew that it is never easy to bring these things into our space and keep them here. Even the more limited otherworldly creatures have a hard time maintaining a foothold in the human planes, which is why demons and gods aren't always under foot.

So, we did a little low orbital recon. With my energy sensitivity and Wildstar's energy powers, we had the sites mapped out in a few hours. We also noted that one of the sites, the one in the Carpathian mountains (wouldn't you just know it?) was stronger than all the others combined. A few of the magic types, Johnny Warlock (a creepy kid who started out as a villain, but got scared straight), Mystere and Karl Rainwater, a Sioux shaman, figured that the Carpathian site was the original foothold point. The creature was manifesting most strongly there. All the other points wear like the tips of its fingers, by comparison.

This gave us the idea of striking off the serpent's head, so to speak. The idea being, if we broke it's strongest hold, we could more easily break it loose from the others. Maybe even cause it to recoil from this plane altogether, but that was a best case type thing.

The workers at the Mexico site had worn heavy leather suits, with copper mesh sewn to them, and heavy copper helmets. We pieced together enough suits for ten of the Arsenal to accompany us, hoping they'd protect them from the emanations from the towers. We loaded everyone who couldn't fly faster than sound in the jump jet, really pushing its capacity for this. Then we went ballistic.

Literally.

The shortest flight time between two points on opposite sides of the Earth is not actually a straight line. It's a ballistic arc. With Wildstar's help, we got the jump jet near escape velocity, pushing into the upper atmosphere on the edge of space. Forty minutes after take-off, we came screaming out of the clear sky over the Carpathian mountain site.



Part of a mountain peak had been blasted away to make room for the installation. Because of the radiations from the towers, the site was lightly manned, but a nearby airfield would launch fighters as soon as they detected us. As the jump jet slowed, it dropped gladiators like a bomb load. Even with their suits, they were feeling the effects of the towers from a considerable distance. We decided to let them take the air field.

Wildstar and I dived in on the installation. The waves of nausea started at about ten miles. It was bad. Looking at the thing was worse. It resembled nothing more than a writhing cluster of tentacles, though it was clearly not composed of anything like matter as we know it. In ever spectrum I could sense, it just appeared 'wrong'. The eye couldn't focus on any detail, as it reflected light strangely, and the glow from the towers and from the thing itself served to confuse the mind. In the one photo we got of it, it looks more like a greenish inverted whirlpool or something. I figured it wouldn't photograph well.

I went for the generator building and Wildstar went after the masts, first severing their support cables, and then blasting at the manganese-tungsten alloy with cosmic energy that seemed to twist aside at the last second, blunting the force. Still, it got the whole thing swaying a little, as the guy wires flailed. I had better luck. The men in the generator building were sluggish and weak. I gave the oil tank a nice burst of stored-up thermal energy and enjoyed the nice cinematic fireball it produced. In the building, the generators wound down, but power still flowed from massive capacitor banks. I eat electricity for breakfast, so I had a nice buffet laid before me. I shorted the capacitors and drained their power until I was topped up. Then I just went about smashing them. The structure caught fire and I went out to see if I could help with the towers.

Wildstar was still working on blasting the towers, but the others had landed by then and Mega had one of them torn up by its roots. The big rings of apparatus were sparking and twisting. I could sense the field strength falling off. The thing inside the field seemed to be fighting back, that's what was turning Wildstar's energy blasts. But as the field strength dropped, the thing was shrinking. was slow, at first, but it was soon obvious that it couldn't hold out. I got in there and broke one of the rings. Tesla hurled a truck into the creature, with spectacular results. The truck and the creature mutually annihilated, sort of like matter and anti-matter. Whatever it was, it broke the thing's hold and Wildstar's blasts tore through a pair of towers, causing the whole thing to sag into itself. A part of one tower broke free and annihilated itself on the creature, which seemed to hurt it even more than the truck.

Seeing this, those of us who could, pushed on the structure to force it into contact, causing the creature to further retreat from this plane. It took a couple of hours for the thing to slink back to its home, but we'd done it. With the installation destroyed and the creature gone, the sick feeling went away.

With the main foothold destroyed, we had an easier time fighting our way to the other sites. It took awhile, but we managed to destroy all of them. By the end, we had even brought some of the Axis gladiators into the fight. In many cases, the creature had exerted some kind of mental control over them. It had to "touch" them, so that it's presence wouldn't repel them, as it did the other supers. Those if found to be less than reliable, it controlled.

We learned the creature's name, too. Sothon Aot. We learned who brought it into the world, first, as well. Albrecht Kuhn, the man who, in our world became Professor Apocalypse, was the chief acolyte of Sothon Aot. He used his scientific genius to create machines that serves as artificial life support for the thing, simulating the myriad dimensions of its home space in an unstable tesseract contained by the towers. I guess it's a good thing he didn't know how to generate stable tesseracts, or the thing might have already consumed the world.

So...now I'm home. A year has passed (here, anyway). My house is gone. Legacy is freaking out over all the time I've been away without contact. Oh, well. I'm hanging out with the Guardians again, on the coast. I helped win World War II....man, how am I gonna get back to regular super-villains, after beating on Nazis?

West Coast

Headed out to the west coast to see what the Guardians are up to. Haven't seen them since they moved out there to start the team with Centurion.

I heard that Adler is having a baby, soon. She's been seen all over Europe with another winged hero, Gyrfalcon. Little winged babies sound cute, but my mind drifts to the horror of poopy diapers from above.

The interstellar intrigue is getting a little weird. With the Overguards rendered inactive, there's no interstellar organization to keep one star empire from devouring the neighboring star republic, etc. We got a report from the lunar base that said the M'wann were making moves on the Kuldar. Neither have been very friendly to Earth in the past, so it's hoped we won't have to take sides in the conflict. We're lucky in that the solar system is kind of a galactic backwater, and we don't really impinge on interstellar politics in a big way.

Well, I'm headed west. I got clearance to go super-sonic once I'm clear of the city. Looking forward to some sun after this winter. Cold doesn't bother me so much, but the gray days get to me, after awhile. I'm thinking I should move my base of ops, but I like being in Pinnacle City, so close to Legacy HQ. Something to think about.

Back in business!

Okay, I know, it has been a long time, but I'm finally back in action.

I've worked out with Omega Unit's training bots so long, now, I can tell them apart by the dents and scratches. Once we figured out why my powers were acting up, it was just a matter of retraining my energy absorbing ability, by exposure to a variety of energy sources. It was tedious, but I'm back to my old self.

Went out on patrol last night, it was cold and snow had fallen earlier in the evening. About 2 a.m. I found this guy in clunky armor trying to break into an office on the 31st floor of the Morrow Building... from the outside. He was trying to be sneaky, obviously, or he woulda just punched through the glass and gone in. The office belongs to Aldrich Innovations, a consulting and design firm. Norm Aldrich made a name for himself, a few years back, by bringing two floundering software companies together to form Awestruck Inc., the 3rd largest PC game maker.

No idea what they'd be doing that would interest a super-villain, but hey, when you catch them in the act of B&E, the why is less important than the stopping them. Or something like that.

Anyway, I plucked him off the side of the building and he kicked me with his boot jets. It was obvious he hadn't heard of me, because he kept tossing plasma bolts at me and flashing me with those jets. I was eating it up, charging up for my attack and all. I realize I'm laughing, like a kid, with the excitement of the chase and all.



So, there we are, twisting and turning our way over downtown, between buildings and such.

I'm laughing, and I can hear him shouting angrily, but his helmet is muffling his words and I just don't care about his plans being folied or whatever. I'm the good guy, he's the bad guy, there's the jail cell.

We were nearing the edge of downtown and he kicked his jets on high and boosted out ahead of me. I let him go for a bit, pull away, until he's just a speck on the horizon, but when I look at him in the infrared he's a flare, a bright beacon. So, I roll and shoot up into the sky, gaining a few thousand feet and then pour my stored energy into speed. Like a rocket I'm streaking across the sky, just like I've practiced and the flare of his jets is getting so big I switch back to normal eyesight. I'm doing nearly mach 2, in my dive and I flash past him almost bfore he knows I'm there. As I close, I focus a beam of microwave energy on his back-mounted jets. One of them blows almost instantly, sending him into a tumbling spiral down to the snowy passes of Overlook Mountain. He's got just enough control to make a hard-but-safe landing and I expend some more energy in braking.

I had him pretty much stripped of armor by the time the Special Services transport arrived.

Oh, he was ranting about Aldrich taking over the world with some kind of new cel phone. I don't know what he was talking about, but hey, I'll look into it. Villains aren't completely mad, like they are in the movies, there may be something going on that needs a look and I know some people who look for a living.

On the mend...

Well, well...
It looks like I was right. The Overguard device I carried was one of the set usually carried by an Overguard to channel the power of the Crimson Flame, the sentient quasar that powered and directed the Overguards. It's power is manifest as a psionic plasma that is shaped and controlled by the wielder's thoughts. Sort of artificial telekinesis.

Even without the full set, I was channelling energy from it all the time. I didn't even know it, but I was becoming dependent on it, even when there was other energy I could use. I'm on Citadel Island, now, working out in a special environment gym. At random intervals, the background energy spectrum in the room changes and I adapt to it, to fuel my workout. Part of the workout has me converting energy from one form to another, with instruments to help me refine my control. I should be stronger than ever, when we're done and capable of finer control that ever before. That's the hope, anyway.

Esprit has been especially attentive, I think she likes me a little too much. I mean, yeah, she just turned 17, and all that, but geez, she's like a sister to me. At least she's been getting out some, I heard she's been teaming up with the Young Guns, lately.

Dr. Omega says his interdimensional sensors are picking up some kind of disturbance in the ether. It could be trouble in a parallel reality that's causing tremors in those around it. Or, it could be something coming our way. It's impossible to tell, even for Tesseract, whose powers let her sense a lot more than any instrument humans have been able to build. Wait and see. He's called a tele-conference between the various super-teams to warn them.

I don't feel so good...

I've been under the weather, recently. A few weeks ago, my powers started acting up. I'd absorb heat and try to expel it as electricity and it would come out microwaves, or I'd try to amp my strength and stuff would catch fire around me. It's very frustrating.

I'm on the inactive reserves with Legacy, at the moment and I'm spending my time on Citadel Island, while Dr.Omega runs tests.

I think it may have something to do with the Overguards. I wore that suit for so long and had that Overguard power gem thing, I think my body got conditioned to drawing energy from it. It may also be a further mutation of the syphon virus, a kind of delayed symptom. It may be a combination of factors. We should know more when my results get back. Man, I wish we had magical labs like on TV, where all the test results come back before the bottom of the hour commercial break.

Oh crap, they want more blood. Damn, this sucks.
Later

Another new suit...

Well, my nifty alien Overguard suit finally bit the dust. It stopped self-repairing and spots where it had previously healed began tearing under minor strain. I contacted Dr. Omega and had them run off a few of our SmartSkins (TM) in my colors. They're not as adaptable as the Overguard suits, but they're better than fighting crime in my sweat pants.

The other day I was involved in a fight with Magister and his Demi-human Liberation Army. I sympathize with the demi-humans, but this guy is always trying to liberate his people so they, and everyone else, can be his subjects. Not my idea of liberty.

He attempted to breach Legacy HQ to steal something from Dr. Oblivion's stash of magical artifacts. He got into the HQ, but as far as we can tell, he didn't get what he came for.

I just realized I haven't shown my updated costume since the big cross-time battle. This is my new SmartSkin (TM) version. I made a little alteration, since I no longer have the Overguard power gem. They tell me we already have over a hundred regular customers for SmartSkins and with their versatility, we'll have more in the future. Its comfortable, too.

Good news is, I'm getting back into the hero thing...

...bad news is, there's a new Abraxas in Dynasty. He's younger, and claims to be the son of the recently deceased Dynasty leader. Valkyrie is leading Dynasty, now, and Ironsmith and I got the call about a warehouse robbery on Connor Road.

We arrived and found these two tearing through the place.



I managed to get in some good shots on this Abraxas, Jr. and he definitely doesn't seem as strong as the original. Could be a hybrid, I suppose. Still packs a punch, but I can charge up quite well from his punches. He also tosses around some impressive energy beams from the eyes that started the fire.

Ironsmith got a workout in his latest rust bucket. Why he paints them up that color, I will never know.

The warehouse was a mess, but it looks like they left without whatever it was they came for, so that's a plus.
Back in business. It feels good.

I'm still NOT DEAD...

And that's more amazing than it sounds.

Okay, I've been dragged across half the freakin' galaxy, since the start of summer and all I wanted was a nice, relaxing vacation!!!

I went with the Elysians to their orbital habitat and they tested out the ancient hyperdrive, and it worked! We jumped a few light-minutes at a time, making a circle around the solar system. It was fun and the stars were brilliant and untwinkling and all that. After awhile, it was time to go home so they programmed a jump to take us back to solar orbit, just inside Earth's orbit.

This time, the drive did something decidedly nasty. Instead of dropping us into a parallel orbit with Earth, it jumped us across the damn galaxy. Something about a fold in space-time or something, wrong place/wrong time, whatever.

We reappeared in normal space in the middle of the battle of the millenium. There was what looked like an enormous red star near us and there were thousands of space ships of different types in the space around us. The habitat reacted by erecting some pretty powerful force shields, and the battle raged around us as if we'd never appeared.

Then something strange (yeah, I know) happened. My Overguard power gem started reacting and I got this flood of information. The red star was, in fact, the massive quasar--sentient quasar-- the Overguards call "the Crimson Flame". It's the source of all their power and fuels their technology as well. The Flame was calling for help.

Overguards were responding, but distances are enormous on the galactic scale and there was simply no way for them all to get here. The attackers were using a power of their own, a kind of indigo/violet energy they tossed around the way the Overguards do their red energy. They are known as the Brotherhood of the Black Sun and their power source is a strange, dark quasar that radiates mostly in the ultraviolet. I'm told that violates a bunch of laws of physics, as we know them, but I saw the thing and it's real. It's also very powerful, probably as powerful as the Flame, and had all its forces concetrated to the task of capturing or destroying the Flame.

Now, there are a lot of very powerful Elysians, so it wasn't long before we had a squad or space-worthy types ready to join the fight. It took some time to get the habitat to open a window in the shield, for us, but we got out and made contact with the Overguards and their allies.

The fight was brutal. Space combat is the weirdest thing I've had to learn. No gravity to work with, so flying is always tricky. Easy to move, difficult to maneuver. At least there was plenty of energy to eat.

So, we fought. And we fought.

We lost. We were simply outgunned and there was no help for it, but to grab all the survivors we could and bug out.

The Flame, realizing it was about to fall into enemy hands did the only thing it could. It used its own power to warp itself out of normal space. Better than it falling into the hands of the Black Sun crowd, but deadly for the Overguards in the field. At least the Flame managed to send out one last warning signal. The Overguard tech holds a residual charge for a few hours, so most Overguards would be able to find a safe haven, before their power went dead.

So, the Overguards are no more. My gem went dark about 6 hours after the Flame disappeared. No one knows if the Flame is still alive, or if it committed suicide. The habitat is now a crowded place, 580,000 people of 16 different species living there. There's room enough, but feeding them all is going to take some work. They hyperdrive still works, but the jumps back to Earth took a lot longer than the one out had. We couldn't locate that ripple in space-time that vaulted us across space on the way out.

On the way back, we met several Overguard ships, running on backup power supplies. Limping home, like we were. We managed to get some of our evacuees to ships headed for their homeworlds, and by the time we popped back into orbit around Sol, we were down to 389,000, or so.

Here's the thing. The Overguards have acted as the de facto peacekeepers in the galaxy for thousands of years. Now, there is no peacekeeping force in the galaxy, and there's a new, very dangerous threat running loose. Earth's status as neutral territory may be threatened. It's suddenly a very different galaxy out there.