Showing posts with label Earth-349. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Earth-349. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
Earth-349: Hawkman
[Still finding Earth-349 stories that I haven't posted to the blog]
by Anton Psychopoulos, Ph.D.
Disclaimer #1: This story is inspired by a story in Superman #349, but is not limited by that story or any other.
Disclaimer #2: This story makes use of copyrighted characters owned by DC Comics, Inc., and other publishers. It is written for amusement only and is not intended to infringe or disparage those copyrights.
Disclaimer #3: This story is not recommended for persons under 18 or the easily offended, especially those who are disturbed by themes such as transgender and the end of the world.
Prologue One: Earth-1
Katar Hol, son of Paran Katar, member of the Hawk Police of Thanagar, lifted the absorbascon from his head and looked around him, allowing his mind to return to being merely the consciousness of a single man, rather than a vast, almost impersonal awareness possessing all the knowledge of all people on Earth. Quickly sorting through what he had moments ago grasped in its entirety, plucking from the fading vision of Earth entire the things he actually needed to retain, he allowed himself to reflect for a moment on the shock he had felt the first time he had absorbed Terran knowledge, and begun the long transition from a visiting police officer hunting an escaped criminal, to an interested observer and ally of Terran humanity, and finally to something that was almost as much Terran as Thanagarian. The absorbascon had allowed him and his partner (and wife) to learn the languages and customs of their hosts, enough to allow them to pose in their off-duty hours as ordinary Terrans, but a true understanding had taken much longer.
Now, though, after nearly a decade on Earth, he was more likely to think of himself as Carter Hall than as Katar Hol, as “the” Hawkman of the Justice League than as a Hawkman of the Thanagarian police.
Yet this planet, not his birthplace, now seemed as though it had always been destined to be his home.
Prologue Two: Earth-2
Carter Hall, son of Perry Hall, secretly the world-famous mystery man known as Hawkman, tied the leather thong that wrapped the handle of the mace and cut it short with a razor blade. He turned it, inspecting his work approvingly. The weapon, which had served a soldier in the armies of Philip of Macedon, would serve Hawkman for another day.
Hall reflected on the confused time when he had first learned of his past life in ancient Egypt, the days when he had recreated his ancient feat of adding a “ninth metal” to Egyptian alchemy’s eight. Hall had become Hawkman, and made his girlfriend into Hawkgirl. Strange to think it had been nearly thirty years. It didn’t seem so long.
Now they were an old married couple, with a fine son, Hector, who might just become a mystery man himself one day, taking his father’s place in the Justice Society.
Hall twirled the mace in the air, tossing and catching the deadly implement with practiced ease.
Reincarnation, antigravity, masked heroics. What a life. Yet it all felt exactly right. As though it had been meant to be from before Egypt had existed.
Prologue Three: Earth-3
Hol Hektah, son of Peren Hektah, had risen through the ranks of the police agency which kept the rulers of imperial Thanagar in power, promoted from Wingman to Falcon and eventually to Eagle. He had done it by hard work, by careful politicking, and by knowing when to take chances. When the job of hunting down the anti-imperialist activist Bythor had come up, Hol had used every trick and favor he had to get the assignment. Hol had known that rooting Bythor out of the unknown planet “Earth” would be no simple find-him-and-kill-him mission, and that carrying it out successfully would be his route to the highest honors, his best chance of one day holding the title of Hawkman, supreme commander of the force that kept the flying cities of the Hawkworld in the air.
His lover, Sondar, had stowed away. That made her a deserter from her demolitions unit, but she had figured that he would need the bombing skills that had earned her the nickname “Egglayer” to kill Bythor, and that returning as the partner of a hero would win her forgiveness. And if they failed, they would probably be dead anyway.
They had arrived at Earth so full of confidence. How could they have guessed just how mad a planet Earth really was?
The Crime Syndicate, the rulers of the planet, had already killed Bythor. They’d had no more use for his talk of human rights and justice than Hawkworld had. Hol and Sondar had been permitted to live, provided they helped the Crime Syndicate protect Earth from other invaders, but they would never be allowed to return to Thanagar and warn their superiors about the dangerous superhumans of Earth.
Now the madman Johnny Quick had raped Sondar, and she was pregnant. Hol could not allow his beloved’s child to grow up on this mad planet; they would have to make a break for it. To live any longer on Earth? It was never meant to be.
Prologue Four: Earth-24
Jerzy Holiuski threw himself against the hangar door. The corrugated sheet metal groaned loudly, but refused to yield. Chuck Rensie, the Texan Holiuski had met earlier that day, approached with a long metal rod which he levered into the door, trying to pry it open where Holiuski had failed.
"What are you expecting to find in here, anyway, Polack?"
Holiuski shrugged.
"I don't know. Maybe parts for your plane, maybe petrol. Maybe a new plane for me. But if you are serious about this idea of becoming some kind of air pirates to fight the Nazis, we will need things we will only find at an air base like this one, no?"
"Yeah," Rensie grunted, leaning on the bar. "And your Polacks bugged outta here so fast, they musta left plenty behind."
Holiuski walked around behind Rensie, placing the bar between them. The American turned around to face him.
"One more thing: don't call me 'Polack' again, Yankee."
Rensie's fair, freckled face turned livid at the word "Yankee", and he lunged for the Pole. This had the desired effect, the bar levering the door open with a scream of rent metal before dumping Rensie on the ground.
Rensie jumped up, already beginning to laugh, when he saw Holiuski's expression. He followed the Pole's eyes, looking into the hangar.
At first he thought they were parachutes hung on a rack. But then he saw that the leather harnesses were connected to seven sets of black-feathered wings.
Prologue Five: There Is No More Earth-168
Hank and Don Hall still felt as though they were standing on some kind of solid surface, even though they could see nothing more beneath them than they could in any other direction: only something like swirling, pearlescent fog.
"God damn it," Hank snarled, the long red "feathers" of his cape rustling like palm fronds, "this didn't have to goddamn happen!"
"It was bound to happen, thanks to barbarians like you," snapped Don, wagging a white-gloved finger under his brother's nose.
"What, now you're gonna blame me for this? This is the goddamn end of the world, little brother!"
"And in the face of your world's end, still you learn nothing," said the Voice which had given them the powers of the Hawk and the Dove. "Can you imagine how disappointed I am in you?"
"I did what I could," Don raged, "but how much could I do, when you gave just as much power to the wrong side?" He stabbed a finger at Hank.
"Still you think of sides. Still you think either you or your brother should have dominated the other. You have learned nothing, and your world is forfeit because of it."
"I told you," Hank snarled. "I told you appeasement would only --"
"Enough. Your world is destroyed because it failed to learn the lesson I created you to teach it. And you failed because you never learned it yourselves. But that world is done, and a new role awaits you, on a new world."
"Then it's true," Don said softly, "there are other worlds, other Earths?"
"There are. And on a thousand Earths I have placed my champions, my Hawks. Each has a different role to play, according to the nature of the Earth. On the world for which you are bound, after a transformation, you shall have a new destiny, as parents of a new generation of Hawks."
"Parents?" Hank said, horrified. "No, you can't do that! Even if the little drip isn't much of a man, he's still my brother, and I'm not gonna marry him even if you do change him!"
The Voice paused, and somehow the silence took the place of a chuckle.
"Fear not, Henry Hall. Incest is not what I mean to be your fate.”
Epilogue: Earth-349
The alarm clock woke Perry Carter at 6:00 AM exactly, just as it had the day before, back at MIT. He took pride in keeping to routine.
Shutting off the clock, he looked around his bedroom, the same one he had lived in as a child. It was the largest private room in Carter Hall, as befitted the son of the head of the Carter family, but it was smaller than the bathroom of his apartment at school.
The Carters were the wealthiest of the four Founding Families of Laputa, but space upon the flying island was scarce, and there were limits to how much space money could buy.
Then again, Carter reflected as he pulled on his green hose and tied his sandals, nobody else at MIT had his own set of wings, or the antigravity belt that allowed them to carry him on the winds. These items, his most precious possessions, he removed carefully from their cabinet on the wall.
His mother, Saundra Carter, had worn them during the Second World War as Lady Hawk, one of the world’s first superheroes. Now he wore them as Hawkman.
Carter checked the wing-harness and flew neatly from his bedroom window, soaring into the dawn sky towards the edge of the sky-island. Below and to his right, he saw fat old Asa Whitney on his flying carpet, cruising slowly just above the ground. To his left, his uncle Einar soared on his green batwings. All the fliers, of course, were using small bits of Ixium, the same mysterious substance that kept the sky island in the air.
Directly ahead, the lip of the island was ploughing through a cloud, spilling streamers of fog over the green lawns. There seemed to be someone standing there, dangerously close to the edge, especially in the fog. Carter flew down towards the edge, beginning to make out a pair of bodies, two women dressed in odd birdlike costumes that might have been meant to be tributes to his own. He flew down towards them.
Saturday, September 7, 2013
Earth-349: The Fantastic Four
Earth-349: Catwoman
Earth-349: Catwoman
by Anton Psychopoulos, Ph.D.
Disclaimer #1: This story is set on a hypothetical parallel world within the pre-Crisis DC Universe, based on a story in Superman #349, but is not limited by that story or any other.
Disclaimer #2: This story makes use of copyrighted characters owned by DC Comics, Inc., and other publishers. It is written for amusement only and is not intended to infringe or disparage those copyrights.
Disclaimer #3: This story is not recommended for persons under 18 or the easily offended, especially those who are troubled by themes such as age regression and spanking.
She entered the Starr Electronics office through the front door, dressed as a cleaning woman, but as soon as she was inside, she pulled the cowl over her head. These things had to be done properly.
The safe door was made of a modern composite material: impervious to acids and the heat of anything not nuclear-powered. The lock was electronic, just as up-to-date, very impressive-looking -- and about as hard to crack as a gym locker. She had it open it two minutes.
She would leave the way she had entered, without a trace, but these things had to be done properly, or one might as well just write bad checks, so she cut a neat circle from the window with her glass cutter and laid it on the floor. She chuckled as she imagined them trying to figure out how she had scaled the outside of a glass-faced skyscraper, then snarled as she noticed that the window didn't open at all. She thought about cutting a bigger hole, one plausibly big enough for a very athletic person to climb through, then shrugged and left things as they were. Call it a symbol. Symbols were important.
She was so upset by her gaffe with the window that she almost left the office with the cat-mask still in place. She was just reaching up to pull it off when a low voice behind her murmured, "Here, Kitty, Kitty."
She spun, her movements not hampered by the baggy garments of a cleaning woman. Her leg lashed out precisely at the source of the voice, but Batwoman had already moved half a step back. Catwoman's heel met a gloved hand rather than a jaw. The Dark Dame yanked the burglar off her feet, with an extra tug as her head approached the floor to spoil her fall. Catwoman's head cracked loudly against the floor, and Batwoman pressed the advantage, flipping the stunned criminal onto her belly and yanking her arms painfully behind her back. Knees dug cruelly into the small of Catwoman's back, and she did not recover in time to escape the manacles Batwoman snapped onto her wrists.
Catwoman almost got away as Gotham's Guardian moved to bind her ankles, but in seconds the second pair of shackles were in place, and then a chain was looped between the two, pulling Catwoman's body into a painful bow.
"More chains than the cops use, Batty-girl. You must like them."
"Sorry to disappoint you, Lois," Batwoman said evenly. "This is strictly business. I knew a pair of handcuffs weren't nearly enough to hold you."
"So, it's Lois now, is it? Am I supposed to be impressed?"
Batwoman peeled the cowl from Lois Lane's face, made ugly by unconcealed loathing.
"I wouldn't mind if you were. The police hadn't figured it out yet."
Catwoman gave a snarling laugh.
"The cops in this town haven't got any more brains than they do balls."
Batwoman's face betrayed a hint of emotion.
"Not funny, Lois. Drake Lance is a good man. He doesn't deserve the suffering he's going through because of you."
Inspector Drake Lance had publicly promised to "put a collar" on Catwoman. She'd assaulted him in his apartment and castrated him, then delivered his testicles to his fiancee with a note reading, "Your Drake is now a capon".
The Catwoman shrieked with rage.
"He deserves it! They all do!"
Batwoman shoved a bat-shaped chunk of black foam rubber between Lois' bared teeth and secured the straps,. gagging her. She hoisted the struggling criminal onto her back and carried her to the elevator.
"It's obvious, Lois, what your problem is. You feel that there's no man on Earth who comes up to your standards, and you've decided to take out your frustration by hurting the best men you can find, men like Lance, or like Cal Starr, who would have been bankrupted by your little industrial espionage tonight."
The elevator opened. Catwoman continued to struggle, but her arms were growing tired in their unnatural position behind her back.
"I tend to agree with you, Lois. You are a superior woman, and you deserve a superior man. But did it ever occur to you that you put too many barriers between yourself and men? Challenging their right to court you is one thing; acting like you despise them is another. It would take a man who was really superhuman to put up with that kind of treatment for long."
The elevator opened onto a basement garage. Batwoman carried her prisoner to the black panel van she privately thought of as "Batmobile #4". With Catwoman secured in back, Batwoman changed from her bizarre black and gray costume into a less conspicuous disguise: a dirty-blonde wig, jeans, a cordurouy jacket, a large mole on her nose. She wondered for a moment why she had worn the Batwoman costume to confront Catwoman, then reminded herself that one really had to do things the right way, if one was going to do them at all.
Catwoman lay silently in the back of the van as Batwoman drove the van out onto the street and parked, pulling the handset of a concealed car-telephone from under the dashboard. She dialed a number, spoke a few words, hung up and drove on. Catwoman remained still and silent, no doubt methodically exploring her bonds. A sudden storm of muffled cries and snarls made it obvious when she figured out that the cuffs had no key mechanism at all, and would have to be cut off.
Batwoman drove towards the upper West End of Gotham, onto the campus of New Devonshire State University, and parked the van at the back of Crane Hall. Professor Carter Nicholls was waiting at the door as she carried the bound Catwoman inside.
"You can take the manacles off her now," Nicholls said as Batwoman laid Lois Lane on a padded table.
"What kind of restraints do you have?" Batwoman asked, looking over the table.
"We won't need any. She's already under."
Batwoman looked and saw that Catwoman's eyes were glazed, her breathing shallow. Professor Nicholls had induced a deep hypnotic state in the few seconds it had taken her to carry Catwoman into the lab.
She removed the restraints and straightened Catwoman's body on the table, disturbed by how compliant but unresponsive she was, like a jointed mannequin, neither asleep nor awake.
"Now, if you'll give me about an hour, er, Miss Wayne, I'll have her ready for you to take home."
"Are you sure you'll be safe with her, Professor?"
"Oh, quite safe. But I would like some privacy while I work."
Batwoman nodded and headed for the door. Professor Nicholls possessed some sort of reality-altering technique which he'd never revealed to anyone. Batwoman didn't even know if it involved psychic powers, technology or something totally unimagined. But on several occasions, he had sent her, alone or accompanied by Robin or Batgirl, into the past and future, and had once transformed her into a young girl, walking through modern Gotham with no memory of her adult life.
Batwoman sat in the van for an hour, going over Korean vocabulary cards and doing a few Yoga exercises, until Nicholls came out and ushered her up to his lab. she went, carrying a large shopping bag.
Lois Lane's body was almost lost in the dumpy cleaning woman's dress. Even the purple bodysuit underneath was now baggy, no longer skintight. The body on the table was that of a girl no older than ten. The soft oval face, seeming now comfortably asleep, showed no trace of the cruelty of Catwoman, or the brittle sophistication of Lois Lane.
"Now, remember, Miss Wayne, her transformation seems complete, and it should be complete, but it could easily break down in the early stages. It would be easy, if she fell into her old habits, for her to regain her memories of adult life, maybe even to spontaneously regain her adult body. You must keep her living as a young girl, an innocent young girl . . . ."
Batwoman looked up from the table. Nicholls had pulled a pair of pink cotton briefs from the bag and was clutching them nervously, sweat beading on his forehead as he stared down at the girl on the table, biting his lip.
"That's all right, Professor. I'll take it from here."
Nicholls swallowed and nodded gratefully, though it took him a moment before he put the panties down.
Batwoman carried the girl to the van. She was now dressed in a navy blue pleated skirt, pale blue blouse, white sweater vest, blue socks and mary janes. The Professor saw them out, and Batwoman drove them away into the night. It was late now, so she went to the Corolla Building penthouse rather than drive all the way out to the mansion in Fingerwood.
She laid Lois on the living room couch, changed out of her disguise, and checked the time. She'd timed it perfectly; the program she wanted was about to start. She bent over the sleeping girl.
"Antwerp," she whispered.
Lois blinked and looked around.
"Um, hello?"
"Hello, Lois. My name is Roberta. You're going to be living with me now."
The girl made a sour face.
"Another foster home? Swell."
"Well, Lois, this time things are kind of different. This is going to be hard for you to believe at first, but it'll be easier if you watch something first."
She picked up the remote control and turned on the television. The girl's eyes widened.
"You have a televisor?"
That was good. She was relating to the TV set as the rich person's novelty item it had been twenty years before.
The screen showed a handsome blonde man with his arm around a slender woman with chocolate-colored skin, waving to reporters.
"--ormer astronaut Steve Trevor today announced his candidacy for the Sen--"
CLICK
A handsome man in a tux sang into a microphone as he gazed into the eyes of a beaky woman in an outrageous hat.
"--enaded his wife of eighteen years with the comic-romantic song 'That's Amore'. Lewis responded in her typical madcap fash--"
CLICK
Earth, as seen from space, filled the screen. The image pulled back to reveal a second Earth, then a dozen, then hundreds of tiny, identical Earths. White letters appeared over the multiplying worlds: "New Devonshire Educational Television Presents More Worlds Than One."
Lois sat rapt through the program as it moved quickly through famous disappearances (Marshal Ney, Oliver Cromwell), mysterious people who seemed to come from nowhere (Kaspar Hauser, Mary Psalmanasar), inexplicable artifacts (the Kensington Stone, Lomellini's Column) and other historical anomalies, to modern physics and finally to the documented crossings between worlds of recent years (the Flash photographed the streets of a "Crossroads City" that existed in place of Hub City; a real-life Captain America held a captive Adolf Hitler aloft by his collar). From time to time she looked around the room, noticing objects even stranger than the huge color screen of her host's "televisor".
When it was over, Lois looked down and saw she was holding Roberta's hand.
"So, I'm in a different world now? I'm from that, um, Earth-348?"
"No, hon, another one. One that . . . doesn't exist any more."
It was true enough. The Earth-349 of the 1940s was long gone.
"And now I'm gonna live here with you?"
"That's right. I have your room ready for you at the big house outside of town; for tonight, you can sleep in the spare room here."
Lois pulled her hand from Roberta's.
"Suppose I don't want to?"
She jumped up from the couch with what looked disturbingly like decades of athletic experience working her ten-year-old body.
"I wake up in this weird place, and you tell me a crazy story about how it's 1966 and a whole new world, and you've got a nice room for me and --"
Roberta rose slowly from the couch.
"Lois, honey--"
Lois snatched up a glass bowl from the coffee table and held it over her head.
"Tell me what's really going on, you bitch!"
Unexpectedly, instead of trying to hit Roberta with the bowl, Lois swung it sideways and smashed in the TV screen.
A hand clamped on Lois' wrist. She was hauled off her feet and over the coffee table without touching it. She landed on the couch, across Roberta's lap.
"That, young lady, is enough!"
Roberta was surprised by the voice she heard coming from her own lips. It wasn't the stern voice of Roberta Wayne in the boardroom, nor the inhuman menace of Batwoman. With a start, she recognized it as the voice of an angered mother.
Lois kicked and thrashed as Roberta flipped up her skirt and yanked down her panties, but she did not display the preternatural grace she had a moment ago. She merely struggled as any child might.
And when Roberta's hand came down again and again on her small pink buttocks, Lois responded in a perfectly natural fashion for a ten-year-old: she kicked and screamed and was shortly in tears.
Roberta sat her young charge upright and glared into her eyes.
"Now, there will be no more outbursts like that, will there?"
"No, ma'am."
The tiny, contrite voice was immensely gratifying to hear. But then, Roberta reflected, four days as a captive of the Penguin had shown her that mysterious time-bending abilities were not really needed to turn a grown woman into a snivelling, obediant child.
"All right, then. How about if you wash your face and get ready for bed?"
"Yes, ma'am."
By the time Lois had had a bath and brushed her teeth, she was calling her guardian "Roberta", which made Roberta feel better about the whole project. She was confident that she and Alfred, and little Delia, would be able to provide Lois with a proper second chance at life.
She even got a good night kiss.
Monday, December 24, 2012
Earth-349: The Atom
by Anton Psychopoulos, Ph.D.
Disclaimer #1: This story is set on a hypothetical parallel world within the pre-Crisis DC Universe, based on a story in Superman #349, but is not limited by that story or any other.
Disclaimer #2: Some characters appearing in this story are based on copyrighted characters owned by DC Comics, Inc., Marvel Comics and others. Their use here is not intended to infringe or disparage those copyrights.
Disclaimer #3: This story is not recommended for persons under 18 or the easily offended.
The last time Martha Palmer had awakened naked, on a cold floor, with no idea where she was or how she'd gotten there, had been several years earlier, well before she had become the Atom. The experience had not improved with age.
Resisting the urge to stretch her stiff and aching limbs, Martha opened her eyes to cautious slits, blinking repeatedly to make them focus, trying not to give away to any watcher that she was conscious. A sudden draft, tickling between her legs, confirmed Martha's suspicion that she had already given away plenty to any watcher.
Her eyes focussed reluctantly on some pattern of vertical lines. Wallpaper? Fence pickets? Oh, God, jail bars?
No. These bars were metal, but gold-colored. And the floor under her wasn't concrete, but more metal.
Martha rolled her eyes slowly upward, trying to get a glimpse of the ceiling. There didn't seem to be any. The bars just continued up and up, curving overhead to form a rounded framework from which hung . . .
A swing.
"Son of a bitch!"
She sat up suddenly. In spite of her shock and outrage, her mind noted the way her body moved, the floating, "weightless" feeling of being reduced to a size where inertia doesn't work quite the way it does on the human scale.
Her scream brought an enormous shape moving towards the cage from the misty distance.
"How nice. my little birdie is awake," thundered the immense black and yellow mass. It leaned closer, and Martha made out an immense masked face.
"Welcome to your new home, little birdie. You are now the property of . . . Yellowjacket."
Martha looked up at the black cowl, brow furrowed, head cocked.
"Henry?"
Yellowjacket recoiled from the cage, hands to his cowl as though checking that it was in place.
The Atom jumped to her feet, shaking her sliver-sized index finger at the immense figure. Yes, she was about six inches tall, a common size for the Atom to assume. At ant size, she'd have had difficulty in standing on two feet.
"Henry Pym, you son of a bitch! Stealing my research wasn't enough, you had to kidnap me and steal my costume?"
Pym cringed behind his mask, actually seeming to grow smaller. A little.
"That's not fair, Martha. We were both building on Dane's research --"
"You didn't even know what a micropion was until I pointed them out on Darrell's CERN printouts! If it weren't for me, you'd still be fiddling around with hallucinogenic gases."
Henry's hand lashed out, flashing past the cage like an express train. Knives lanced through the Atom's feet. She fell to the floor, and the electric current stabbed at every place her flesh touched metal.
Fighting panic, Martha got to her feet, dancing in agony, and lunged for the wood-and-plastic swing.
Seated precariously on the swing, the Atom caught her breath, forcing herself to become calm. She saw Henry's black-gloved finger pressing a button on a golden column she guessed was the cage's stand. He grinned at her, releasing the button.
"That was your first lesson, little birdie. Yellowjacket did not go to the trouble of catching his little pet in order to hear her screech at him like a crow. Your function in this house is to sit on your little perch and sing sweetly."
Martha started to get down from the swing, but Henry's finger flicked towards the button.
"Stay on your perch, birdie. I like seeing you there.
"Swing, birdie."
Like a child at a playground, the Atom began pumping her bare legs back and forth, driving the swing into a small oscillation.
"Faster, birdie."
Higher and higher went the swing, until Martha saw the floor and the cage roof on each pass, her brown hair flying into her face, her breasts slapping against her chest.
"Sing for me, birdie."
"Henry," Martha gasped, breathless, the swing slowing, "Henry, that's enough. You've got to stop now."
She saw the black glove coming but could do nothing to brace for the impact. The metal cage screamed as the Atom was flung against its walls, crashing back and forth as the world lurched around her.
"Stop calling me that!" Yellowjacket screamed, shaking the cage in both hands so Martha rattled inside it.
"Henry Pym is dead! I fed him to a spider! Ant Man is dead, too! I squashed him under my shiny new black PVC boot! Giant Man is dead! I, uh, I shot him!"
The Atom had just enough presence of mind left not to say You left out Goliath, schizo boy.
"Now, who am I?"
"Yellowjacket. You're Yellowjacket."
"Good. And what are you?"
"I'm your little birdie."
"You are learning fast. Not bad for a little bird-brain."
He dropped the cage, letting it swing freely.
"Back on your perch, birdie."
Favoring her bruised left leg and her aching right wrist, Martha climbed back onto the swing.
"Sing for me, birdie."
Trembling with fear and humiliation, Martha was unable to think of any song but "Workin' on the Railroad", but that seemed to please Henry just fine. When she was done, she continued with "Barbara Allen" and was halfway through "Lord Randall" when Henry suddenly interrupted.
"Would you like some clothes to wear, birdie?"
Martha was surprised by his sudden question and his softened tone of voice, but quickly chirped "Oh, yes, please, Yellowjacket, sir!"
Taking the Atom's servile twittering at face value, Henry opened the cage (nearly knocking Martha from her perch as he fumbled with the latch). He'd spent enough time interacting with relatively gigantic people that he knew better than to reach into the cage and try to grab her; he held out his hand, palm up. slightly cupped, and allowed her to climb onto his fingers. Holding her near his body, he carried her to a department-store sized desk and set her down on its worktop. He flicked on a reading lamp and seated himself, smiling down at her.
On the desktop, Martha could now see the wall of Henry's study. Numerous degrees and awards hung in neat uniform frames. Uniform frames indeed: pride of place went to the red and blue outfit of the Atom, pinned to a sheet of white cardboard like a butterfly. Martha winced; that was no way to treat a suit woven from irreplacable fibers of spatially distorted dwarf star matter. She wondered if the pins had damaged the wafer-thin control circuits in her gloves.
Henry pulled open a drawer in the desk. It made the desktop under Martha's feet shake as though a subway train were pulling in. He laid a shoebox on the green paper blotter and lifted from it a poisonous-green nightgown. Martha saw at once that it was a piece of doll clothing, made from some light, thin fabric, but to Martha, at doll size, it was as coarse and stiff as burlap. Gritting her teeth, Martha pulled it on, trying to ignore the scraping of the cheap petroleum-based fibers, cooing as she smoothed it over her limbs.
The Atom turned for her captor, trying not to stumble over the too-long hem (it was a very short nightgown, but made for a doll nearly twice Martha's size).
"Oh, Yellowjacket, it's lovely!"
"Heh. And you look lovely in it."
Henry shifted in his chair, recrossing his legs. The Atom hoped he wouldn't be able to see her tiny smirk.
Henry pulled a tiny plastic envelope from the box, opened it and shook out the contents onto the desktop. Martha untangled them and found a black garter belt and a pair of stockings.
"These aren't doll stuff, they're reduced."
"Something that dumb bitch Janet left behind."
Martha looked up warily as she pulled on the stockings.
"You aren't, uh, seeing Jan anymore?"
"No. Stupid cunt. I gave her everything. I gave her shrinking powers. I gave her a costume. I was going to give her wings. Even I didn't have wings."
"Er, really?"
The stockings were laddered, but they probably looked all right from Henry's perspective. Martha stretched a leg out experimentally, lifting the stiff curtain of the nightgown to show off her minute thigh.
"Lovely transparent wasp's wings that would sprout from her back whenever she shrank down. She would have loved them if she'd tried them. Dumb bitch said I was crazy."
Gee, the Atom thought, he wanted to make her into some kind of half-animal freak, he makes me into a caged pet, who would think a guy like that was crazy?
Henry stroked Martha's extended leg with the tip of his index finger.
"How about you, my little pet? Would you like some pretty wings, birdie? Some nice birdie wings with yellow feathers?"
Martha reached back between her shoulder blades as though she were imagining wings growing there.
"Oh, Yellowjacket . . . my goodness!"
Henry squirmed in his seat.
"Dance for me, birdie," he suddenly demanded.
Martha began swaying from side to side, then peeled slowly out of the nightgown. Pressing its rough fabric against the front of her body, she teased him with it through a few steps, then tossed it aside and began stroking her body as she skipped and pirouetted across the blotter.
The Atom stopped, facing her captor, and began squeezing and pulling at her breasts.
"Yellowjacket," she rasped, "won't you let me . . . touch you?"
Henry swallowed hard.
"I won't shrink down," he warned her.
"Oh, no, I like you all . . . big," she cooed.
Casting aside caution, Henry Pym unbuckled his tights and pulled them down, then reached out a hand to convey Martha to his crotch.
The heat and the heavy smell made Martha want to make a very unromantic face, but she leaned against Henry's penis as though it were a column in a Greek temple, tracing over a vein with her fingertips.
"You're so big," she stage-whispered, hoping she wasn't laying it on too thick. She glanced up, and saw that Henry was mesmerized by her performance.
Martha leaned forward and licked at the irregular, salty surface. She looked up at Henry pleadingly.
"If you'd just come down a little, so I could get this lovely monster into my mouth . . . ."
She whined the word "mouth" as though she were a child begging for a taste of a favorite treat.
Henry glared down at her suspiciously, but Martha threw her arms around his cock and hugged it, rubbing her tiny mound against the shaft in one of the strangest dry-humps in history. He shuddered and plucked her from his lap, no longer taking care not to hurt her, and twisted a knob at his belt.
He climbed onto the desk as he shrank, stopping while he was still well over a foot tall.
"You won't try anything," he insisted, "not when I'm still twice your size and eight times your weight."
Martha stepped cautiously forward, her eyes exactly at his crotch level, and nuzzled his member cautiously.
"I don't want to try anything, sir," she insisted in a good-little-girl voice, "except that wonderful cock."
She fitted the act to the deed and her lips to his glans. It wasn't all that good a fit, since relative to her his penis was a foot long and as big around as a soda can. She was barely able to get the monster's head in her mouth, and while Henry enjoyed the sight of her struggling with his penis, he knew he needed to be smaller to enjoy her fully.
Stepping back, he twisted the same control knob and reduced himself to nine inches. He still towered over Martha, but now she could fit his penis into her mouth, and did.
It was still the biggest penis she'd ever had in her mouth, and in spite of herself the Atom had to admit she was enjoying it. If only Henry weren't such a screwed-up creep, they could have had a very good relationship as superheroic colleagues. But then, they could have had that as graduate students, too, but Henry had been messed up even then.
She pushed up his yellow shirt, stroking his chest with her tiny hands, trying to give him pleasure with the touch o fher skin against his. He took the hint and pulled the shirt off over his head. The black cowl came with it.
Martha tugged Henry's pants down to his knees. He didn't object. She pulled at his boot top, and he lifted his foot to help her undress him.
When Henry was naked, his costume piled on the desktop, Martha cupped her hand by her mouth, as though to whisper something to him. He bent down from his nine inches of height to her six, until his ear was level with her mouth.
He didn't expect her to be able to lift her foot that high, or for it to connect with his chin with so much power.
"Eight years of ballet," Martha snarled as she lunged for his Yellowjacket costume.
Henry staggered towards the Atom, trying to get the belt away from her before she could enlarge herself. He wasn't expecting her to suddenly wrap it around his neck and twist the shrinking knob.
Between the blow to the jaw and the shock of involuntary reduction, Henry barely perceived Martha tying his hands with his own tights, then climbing the wall to knock down the frame holding her costume. The next thing he perceived clearly was Martha, in the red and blue of the Atom, knocking his desk telephone off the hook and painfully dialling a long series of digits with a pencil held in her arms. And then she grabbed him and things were very confusing again.
Henry had a concussion, that had to be it. Otherwise, why would he still have the feeling that he was at reduced size when all the people around him were normal sized, or only a little above average?
He shook his head, trying to make sense out of the babel of voices around him. They were speaking some soft, fluid language he didn't recognize, though it sounded vaguely Asian. Their clothes were strange, too, sort-of Asian, sort-of European 18th Century, but really like nothing he'd ever seen before. The occasional American T-shirt or baseball cap only heightened the oddness of the rest of their dress.
Martha was there, too, but her clothing was too weird to credit: she seemed to be wearing her Atom costume, but it always vanished when she was at full size. And she seemed to be taller than he was, which wasn't right.
Thinking of clothing made him notice that he was still naked himself. Somebody handed him what he thought was a towel, and when he just stared at it, somebody else took it and wrapped it around his waist, tying it into a loincloth.
They were in a huge chamber like an airplane hangar, near a large object that might have been a shed erected within the huge room. Henry stared at it for nearly a minute before identifying it as a speaker phone, as seen from a very small size.
She'd reduced the two of them to electron size and carried him along a telephone connection. Darrell had theorized such a thing, but Henry'd had no idea the Atom could actually do it.
So apparently he really was small, less than six inches in height. But then these people . . . ?
He could make out occasional loanwords in their speech: "telephona", "criminalu". And they seemed to be calling Martha "Nardac Martaa" and "Quinbuta Flestrin", but the rest of their speech was just so much jabber to him. But they seemed to be taking him into custody, respectfully listening to Martha, who was speaking to them in their language.
Finally, Martha turned to Henry and spoke to him in English.
"As a Nardac, I'm entitled to give two people per year a summary sentence of up to thirteen moons. I'm only sentencing you to six, and I think you'll find it rewarding work, if not exactly cutting edge."
She gestured at the people around them.
"They want you for their rural electrification program; they don't have nearly enough qualified engineers.
"Personally, I envy you. This is a beautiful country and the people make good neighbors. My duties as Martha Palmer and as the Atom prevent me from spending as much time here as I'd like.
"I'll be back in a couple of moons to check on you. You should be settled in by then, probably fluent in the language. In the meantime, co-operate with the Lawfuls and try to enjoy your stay in Lilliput."
Friday, September 28, 2012
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Earth-349: Cleo Rogers in the 25th Century
By Anton Psychopoulos, Ph.D.
Disclaimer #1: This story is set on a hypothetical world within the pre-Crisis DC Universe. The DC Universe is owned by DC Comics, Inc. This story also makes use of characters and concepts owned by other publishers. The use of these copyrighted elements is done only for the amusement of the author and his readers, and is not intended to infringe or disparage those copyrights.
Disclaimer #2: This story is not recommended for persons under the age of 18, or the easily offended.
Lieutenant Antoinette Cleopatra Rogers, late of the AEF, now of the Niagara Gang, sat up gingerly and looked down at her chest. Hesitantly she cupped her hands over her new, much-larger breasts.
“Pretty good job,” she said cautiously. “Not sore at all, no numb places I can find so far, no scars….”
She hefted one, weighing it in her hand.
“Did they have to be so big?”
Dr. Huer smiled behind his bushy white moustache.
“I’m afraid so. The Intelligence Gangsters do their best, but there is only so small that they can make the equipment they need for this mission. I do hope they won’t get in your way, but….”
He shrugged.
“No, I’ve been practicing with a loaded brassiere that’s actually bigger than these. It’s just that, well, they make me feel like a middle-aged lady, like one of my mother’s friends.”
Huer chuckled.
“In your day, large breasts were out of fashion. Every woman wanted to be a – what was it you called them?”
He flailed his hands in the air.
“A flapper,” Rogers confirmed.
Rogers put on her new bra and pulled her tunic over her head, adjusting the lightweight plastic chainmail to fit over her new breasts as best it would.
“Um, I think I felt something shift inside. I hope I didn’t turn something on prematurely.”
“Don’t be concerned. It is my understanding that the equipment will work automatically at the right time, and will be otherwise harmless and undetectable.”
Rogers shrugged, dismissing the matter, and went out of the medical tent to rejoin Major Kane.
Kane smiled as he looked her up and down, then saluted smartly and turned to lead her across the field.
He was a handsome man with slicked-down hair and a waxed moustache that had played a large role in their becoming lovers soon after she had awakened. He was a pilot of what they called simply “flyers”, and had shot down enough Mongols to earn the nickname “Killer”. He’d also been one of the first 25th Century Americans to accept her story of her bizarre origins.
Rogers had been greeted with suspicion when she first awoke, a stranger with no “gang” to call her own, but when she had persuaded the Niagara Gang that she really was what she claimed to be, they had accepted her like a hero out of legend – which in a sense, she was, having actually been born in the old USA and served in its armed forces.
The Americans of the 25th Century lived in small bands, variously called “gangs”, “orgs” or “cump’nies”, which were something like nomadic Indian bands and something like guerilla units. Although unable to live in fixed places or engage in any but the most elementary farming or manufacturing lest they attract the attention of the rulers of North America, in the vast stretches of countryside between the insular Mongol cities, however, some thirty or forty million free Americans maintained their independence and had even managed some very slow scientific progress over the centuries.
Everyone saluted as she passed, and several of them called out, “Good morning, Loo-tenant!” The rank of Lieutenant had not survived into modern times, so her holding it gave her an added cachet of historical splendor, and earned her reverent greetings from those who could only call themselves “Captains” and “Majors”.
The gangsters who had watched with such reverence as she passed would have been very surprised indeed to see what happened inside the hangar, as Kane methodically tied her hand and foot before stowing her in the cargo compartment of his flyer. He held a canteen to her lips, cautioning her, “Not too much – we have a long flight ahead of us,” before he slapped a swatch of adhesive tape over her mouth.
“I wish I could leave you unbound until we get close to Xanadu, but there won’t be any chance to land and wrap you up once we’re on our way, so it will have to be like this.”
Rogers felt a flutter of unease, a feeling that she should not trust this man. But he was her lover – if she couldn’t trust him, should they be so intimate? So surely he was indeed trustworthy. Besides, she had her orders.
He pulled something out of his pocket and held it up before her eyes. It seemed to be a tiny hourglass, what they called an egg timer back in the 20th Century, on a chain. He placed it carefully around her throat, tucking it between her new breasts.
“There will come a time when your situation becomes truly desperate. When that happens, break this. It might help.”
He kissed her gently and slammed the hatch shut, leaving her in darkness, unable to so much as scratch the itch his saliva had left on her forehead.
Kane’s flyer was the fastest and longest-ranged that any gang in America could field, lofted by antigravity and propelled by force-beams. Still, it took an awfully long time to fly across the breadth of the American continent, the Pacific Ocean, and a good deal of Asia to reach the Mongol capital.
Rogers had not been on such a flight herself, but she knew what was happening outside her darkened cargo bay, how Kane would be streaking in long parabolas that bounced over the dense lower atmosphere like a stone skipping across a pond, rising briefly into the airless reaches where the stars were visible in the daytime. As one who had flown the fragile first generation of aeroplanes, how she yearned to see the fruition of flying as a mature art form….
To distract herself from such envious thoughts, Rogers began thinking about her own strange history, from her childhood in an orphanage to her joining the American Expeditionary Force’s Army Air Corps in 1917 to her becoming a mine inspector after the war, to her being trapped in a collapsed shaft, her life preserved by some miraculous mixture of gases so that she could sleep for nearly five hundred years and one day…
…be trussed and gagged and about to be delivered to the ruler of the world as a pleasure-toy, a bribe to curry favor with him.
Or so the Mongol Emperor supposed. Only a handful of bosses in the Niagara Gang knew her real mission, or the nature of the devices hidden in Rogers’ new bosom. Rogers herself did not know – she supposed it was some sort of spy equipment, intended to learn some secret by scanning the Emperor with radio waves or the like. Her entire mission was to get into the Emperor’s physical presence and then to get away if she possibly could.
The possibility existed in her mind that she was carrying a bomb – two bombs – but as desperate as the free Americans were, suicide missions were not their style, especially with an unwitting bomber.
Strange things had happened during Rogers’ five-century nap. Unfortunately, the period immediately after Rogers’ own time was one of the more obscure. There had been another Great War – or had there been two? Or three? There had been a plague, but nobody knew whether it had caused the collapse of old America, or if it had been so devastating because America had already collapsed. There had been a natural disaster that she thought must have been a giant meteor strike, or had several cities been turned to craters by impossibly big bombs?
She had been able to clear up a few misconceptions. The notion that a great war had begun on September seventh, or maybe December eleventh, was clearly a garbled recollection of how the first Great War had ended on November eleventh, 1918.
There were other things that supposedly had been done during the 20th Century that simply made her head hurt to think about them. Had there really been trips to the Moon? To Mars? Or were these just projects that humanity had promised to themselves? Had there really been a proliferation of people with powers like those of legendary figures like Hercules and Morgana? Had beings come from the stars? Had surgeons really made animals talk and go on two legs?
What came after the great wars and great disasters was all too well-known, alas: sometime late in the 20th Century or early in the 21st, the Mongols had come out of Asia and conquered Europe and then the Americas.
Everyone called them “the Mongols”, but Rogers didn’t know whether they really were descended from the followers of Ghenghis Khan, or if that was just the name the Americans had given to their conquerors. It might even have originated as a term of derision, the way her own comrades had called the Germans “Huns” even though they knew perfectly well that they weren’t. For all she knew, the masters of the world could be Chinese, Japanese or one of the smaller Asian nationalities. There was even a legend that the ancestors of the Mongols had come from the depths of space, and were not entirely human. The conquerors called themselves “Han”, a name that meant nothing to her.
Rogers was startled when Kane suddenly opened the hatch. She must have finally fallen asleep. He hauled her out and hoisted her over his shoulder, carrying her easily even though she weighed nearly as much as he did. Her stiff muscles screamed at being jostled, though she did not allow a whimper to escape from behind the tape.
From her vantage point, Rogers saw mostly the grass Kane walked upon, though if she craned her neck she could get glimpses of smooth-sided buildings that seemed to be surfaced in glass or tile. He stopped at some kind of checkpoint, conversed with guards in the Han language which she did not speak. He stood her on her feet and showed her off to them, groping her in a way that made her glad she was already on intimate terms with her partner. Still, she was aware that she would be handled just as freely by whomever took custody of her, to say nothing of what the Emperor might do with her. She shuddered at the thought, but reminded herself that she had a mission to carry out, and should not be distracted by squeamishness. Or by her disturbing feelings of arousal.
The five Mongols she could see wore what looked like silk pajamas, though they were possibly made of some synthetic fiber, like most American garments. Bright pink, with blue cuffs and lapels and assorted accents in yellow, they did not look much like uniforms, except for being identical. They wore disintegrator pistols much like those of the Americans, but no helmets or even caps. They were smaller than Kane and Rogers, but not conspicuously thin or flabby.
Kane, accompanied by two Mongol guards, passed through sealed doors that hissed as though they had airtight seals, walked down corridors lit by some kind of artificial light that they didn’t have in America, rode in some kind of elevator and finally set her down on a couch in a small room of some sort, and conversed with a robed functionary who came out from behind a desk to examine her.
Rogers had at least been briefed on this part of the scenario: normally, a girl being presented to the Emperor would be bathed, perfumed, painted and dressed in silks.
The entire point of delivering Rogers to the Emperor, however, was to offer her up “raw”, so he could savor the full experience of conquering one of the half-legendary wild Americans, still in her tribal dress, smelling of American food and American sweat. The Imperial pimp, or whatever he was called, was balking at the proposition, and was trying to persuade Kane to at least have the creature given a cursory scrubbing before ushering her into the Presence.
For her part, Rogers would not have minded at least a shower and a chance to piss, but she knew the Mongol would never have thought to consult her, even if she had spoken his language.
Finally, Kane and the Mongol bowed to one another, and her lover turned and departed with one of the guards, leaving her alone with the procurer and the other guard.
The Imperial functionary gestured to the guard, who cut away Rogers’ bonds with surprising delicacy, and with gestures directed her to walk behind him and in front of the guard into the room beyond.
The room was not by any means the most sumptuous Rogers had yet seen in the palace.
Indeed, it was almost spare, with walls of a plain peach ivory color, the ceiling a pale blue that seemed to also be the source of light, the floor covered in a springy brown substance that extended from wall to wall. One wall had a broad, unadorned archway without even a curtain. The only furniture was a low couch that was little more than a huge white cushion on the floor.
From beyond the archway, a calm, smoothly modulated voice called out. The procurer stopped and lowered his head, then knelt. The guard jabbed Rogers in the back, but rather than drop like the procurer, she came to full attention, and when the Emperor entered, she snapped him a brisk salute.
Rogers had expected the Emperor to be a more elaborate version of the procurer, in robes even more resplendent, with moustachios and fingernails even longer, and with some sort of crown in place of the functionary’s black satin pillbox hat. Instead, he wore a plain cream-colored robe and was bareheaded, and had only two small tufts of hair at the corners of his mouth, and two more on either side of his chin. Like every other Mongol she had seen, his face was smooth and unlined, his hair black and glossy, yet she had the impression that he was a good deal older than the others.
The Emperor looked her over and inclined his head a fraction of an inch, then he gestured and the procurer and the guard both bowed and departed.
“Good afternoon, my dear,” the Emperor said in a deep, musical voice, in American which was clear, though oddly accented.
“Good afternoon, Sir,” Rogers replied, remaining at attention.
He paused a moment and then made a small sound.
“Such quaint, exotic ways your people have. I have met other Americans before you, but none quite so…unspoiled. I look forward to spending the next few days with you, as much as my duties permit. I hope you will enjoy your time as my guest, also.”
He reached out and stroked her cheek. His hand was smooth and soft and cool.
“You do not seem too terribly afraid of me. I like that. It is something of a novelty for me.
He moved his hand to her upper arm, feeling the muscles there.
“Not afraid, and not repulsed, even though I must seem even stranger to you than you seem to me.”
Rogers had to admit that she actually found the Emperor quite attractive. He was almost exactly her height, a good deal taller than most Mongols, and well muscled. She had never had sex with a man in as cold-blooded a fashion as her current mission called for, but she did not think she would find the job unpleasant.
Both hands came up now, and cupped her breasts. He squeezed them with the same casual, proprietary air as he might a pair of melons brought for his breakfast. Rogers felt that odd shifting sensation in her right breast again, and wondered whether the equipment, whatever it was, had been activated. She presumed there would be no way for her to tell, but she was wrong about that.
The Emperor’s eyes widened, and he backed away, seeming to shrink.
No. He really was shrinking, growing smaller and thinner, his well-formed limbs turning into slender sticks under his robe, his torso becoming a squarish shape, much wider than it was deep, like a beetle’s. His handsome Asian face became narrow and chinless, with bulging froglike eyes, and was made even more repellent by its expression of extreme fear and malice. By the time Rogers realized that his body really was changing, he was quite unrecognizable as the Emperor, except for his five-foot body being entangled in the same pale-colored robe.
Rogers had finally broken from her rigid attention, backing away from the Emperor. Now she stopped and tried to compose herself. Was this bizarre transformation caused by the equipment hidden in her body? What else might it do, to others or to herself? She reached for the hourglass, wondering whether she dared break it and take a chance on whatever it was Kane had given her, but before she could get hold of it, she found herself unable to move.
Rogers noticed that the Emperor, or whatever the creature really was, had also been frozen in place. Next, she noticed that an odd rhythmic grinding sound was coming from somewhere, and the light in the room was changing as though something were moving in the space to her right, though she could see no object.
The grinding sound rose in pitch, and then she could see something. A large object, like a top the size of a small barn, appeared as though it were emerging from a thick fog, nearly filling one end of the room. When it had fully materialized, the side of the object opened and a metal ladder dropped down. Quickly, four people in green uniforms emerged and laid hands on Rogers and the helpless Emperor.
They were fair-skinned, like 20th Century Americans, and wore green coveralls with red piping. On the left breast of each was a jagged black figure crossed by nine short lines, a stylized representation of a mended tear. On the right shoulder was a red shield-shaped patch with a writhing green snake inside it. A large and handsome blond man and a brown-haired woman grabbed Rogers, while an even larger man and a slender teenaged boy grabbed the creature who had supposedly been the Mongol Emperor. They carried the two like a pair of wooden cigar-store Indians inside the top-like object, which seemed to be bigger on the inside than on the outside.
At the center of the interior space was a circle of seats with restraining straps. A large ugly man with a bare chest was already strapped in. The paralyzed captives were strapped into seats on opposite sides, and then the four in green strapped themselves in.
The ugly man, who seemed to be wearing only a ragged kilt of bearskin, gave a whistle of admiration and then spoke in what sounded like 20th Century English, with a Brooklyn accent.
“Man, in and out again in under a hundred heartbeats. You bozos are really good at this.”
The blonde man smiled tightly at the compliment.
“We find a rip in time, we stitch it up. That’s what we do. We’re rip hunters.”
Rogers noted that the people were actually speaking in two voices, one coming from their lips and the other coming from small boxes at the throats of their uniforms (and in the case of the caveman-like person, on a leather thong around his neck). Their actual speaking voices seemed to be muted, to make their translated voices easier to hear. She wondered, sitting helpless in her seat, how that worked. Among other things.
The grinding noise resumed, thrumming through Rogers’ paralyzed body as she lay in her seat. She felt an odd sense of movement, although she would have been hard pressed to say in which direction they were moving. Her captors spoke only as necessary, apparently guiding their craft on some sort of flight. After a few minutes, the feeling of movement stopped, and then so did the grinding noise. The blond man and the woman grabbed Rogers again, while the large ugly man picked up the supposed Emperor as easily as though he were stuffed with straw.
They carried the paralyzed captives down a long corridor, then an even longer flight of steps, then down another corridor that was smaller and more dimly lit than the first one, a corridor lined with blank doors. At last, they stopped at one door, unlocked it and carried Rogers inside. They laid her on a cot and left her there, still paralyzed, but after the door had shut with a distressingly solid sound, an odd light came on briefly in the ceiling, and when it went out she could move again, with some effort.
She sat up, rubbing her limbs and turning her neck from side to side. The room was small, barely big enough to hold the cot and the sink and toilet that were its only other furnishings. The door did not even have a knob on the inside, and the light had no obvious source. The scene was clean and tidy and suggested an advanced technology, and it was unmistakably a jail cell.
She was in jail. The hoosegow. The nick. Not for the first time, but she didn’t like it any better than before.
She reached inside her tunic, pulled out the hourglass and looked at it. Something to use if her situation became desperate. She reckoned this qualified.
But what, exactly, was this glittering black powder, with occasional sparkles of red and yellow? An explosive? Poison for killing herself? A priceless substance to use as a bribe? That same strange unease, the suspicion that Kane was not to be trusted, stirred inside her. What if it were some sort of booby trap?
The idea of her carrying a booby trap between her “boobies” made her laugh, and the laughter made her dismiss her misgivings. She held the little glass bulbs in her fingers and snapped the narrow stem between them.
Two streams of glittering powder poured upward from the jagged necks of the two bulbs, powder which swirled in the middle of the room like a dust devil. Gradually the dense swirling cloud pulled itself together even more tightly, taking on a humanlike size and shape, its boundaries more and more sharply defined as though it were swirling inside an invisible bottle.
The amount of sand within that defined volume seemed to be increasing, as though more of it were arriving from somewhere. The density increased until it became opaque, and then took on the appearance of a solid surface.
And then suddenly it was as though some illusion had been dispelled, and the human-shaped cloud of sand was a solid object in the shape of a woman, nude and hairless, with very large breasts, a tiny waist and broad-flaring hips.
The thing’s skin was black and glossy, like Bakelite, except for small rectangular panels of red here and there upon her body, and yellow bands like piping that outlined the panels and also her eyes, lips, nipples and labia. All of these anatomical features were disturbingly lifelike, in a way that no designer of the 20th or 25th Century would, she was sure, put on a statue or mannequin. And then it turned its eyes toward her and spoke.
“I am Hourglass, another product of Bannermain Laboratories. I have a programmed lifespan of one hour, during which time all of my resources are at your disposal.”
Rogers stared at the creature.
“You are…a machine?”
The entity nodded.
“That is an acceptable first approximation, in the sense that I am not biological. I will continue to exist for the next fifty-nine minutes and fifteen seconds, during which time my powers and abilities are at your disposal, including the manufacture of various useful materials, the reshaping of objects around you, protection of you from violence and environmental hazards—“
“Can you—Hourglass, can you get me out of here? Can you get me home? I think I have been transported through, um, time.”
The creature paused for a moment, then nodded.
“I detect anomalies in the particles of your body which indicate at least two dislocations in time. I cannot take you directly to the location, in space and in time, in which you originated, but I can transport you to a location where you will be physically safe and from which you will be able to obtain transportation back to your point of origin in both time and space.”
Hourglass shifted her feet and widened her arms, almost as though offering to enfold Rogers in its arms.
“Please remain still and hold your breath while I surround you.”
Rogers wondered why she needed to hold her breath, but complied. After a moment, she saw that Hourglass was again dissolving into a swirling cloud. In moments, the dust surrounded her until it blocked out all light, though she did not feel the touch of anything but a breath of wind. She felt a sensation of movement which was similar to but not quite the same as she had felt aboard the time-top.
Then the cloud thinned again, and Rogers began to see a very different space than the cell where she had been left by the rip hunters.
It was a corridor with walls that looked like polished stone with no seams or joints, lined along both sides with doors set close to one another. Hourglass formed once again from a cloud of tiny bits, standing in the corridor beside her.
“You are now safe in Limbo. I will be able to serve you for another fifty-one minutes and forty seconds.”
“And then what? You turn back into powder?”
“No. My molecules will disperse into carbon dioxide, water vapor and harmless trace amounts of other substances.”
“And that’s it? You just won’t exist anymore?”
“That is my designed lifespan.”
“That’s – I’m sorry, in that case I won’t waste your time arguing about it.”
Rogers looked both ways down the corridor. There were doors everywhere, all apparently labeled in English (she wondered about that, but didn’t want to take the time to investigate). Some had simple utilitarian names like “Dining Room” and “Office Supplies”, while others were more obscure. What did “Timely, Wisconsin, 1889”, “Atlas, Cibola, 1958”, “Central City, Califia, 1961” and “Transverse City, Huron, 2099” mean? And why were they grouped in a row that way? Were they locations, and dates? Could it be possible that in this place, time travel was literally as easy as going through a door?
Hourglass was just standing there, seemingly content to allow her few remaining minutes of life to run out while Rogers dithered. She chose a direction and headed down it, barking, “Follow me” to the machine.
“Hourglass, tell me about this place. You called it Limbo – where is it and, uh, when?”
Passing doors that promised access to “Tel Aviv, 1967” and “Stalingrad, 1943” and other places she had never heard of, Rogers stopped short when she came to a window. There were doors to either side, but looking through the window, Rogers could detect no sign of any rooms to either side. And that was the least of the surprises the window had for her.
Rogers was looking out upon a vast sky like nothing she had ever seen before, spread with what seemed like more stars than she had ever seen even on the clearest night, some of them big enough to appear as tiny disks in the sky, each one too brilliant to look at directly, and in all the colors of the rainbow. She had a feeling that there should not be such a thing as a green star, but with her limited knowledge of astronomy she couldn’t swear to it, and besides, maybe the objects were not stars at all.
The view was so awe-inspiring that Rogers did not notice at first that Hourglass was responding to her last command.
“…outside time, but rather experiencing a short closed loop of time all its own, reusing the same time endlessly. This is why Limbo is often depicted schematically as a figure eight.”
Rogers shook her head. She felt as though she could almost understand what it was saying.
“So, what should I do now?”
“If you wish to return to your place of origin, you should be able to find a door which opens thereto. If you wish to explore the Palace of the Time Being, I will try to protect you while you search for that door. Unfortunately, I cannot help you locate the door, because of the nature of time and space within these confines.”
They came to another window, and Rogers looked out again. This time, she saw what at first she took to be the Earth as seen from space, but as she watched she realized that it was actually just a partial sphere, with another sphere inside it, showing between the gaps. In fact, there were a whole set of nesting spheres, each of them incomplete, at least four of them, going down and down….
Rogers pulled her head back, shaking it slowly.
“It looks very different from when I looked out that other window.”
Hourglass nodded mechanically.
“The images you perceive are all interpretations generated by your brain, in an attempt to make sense of the shape of spacetime itself, something the human nervous system did not evolve to perceive.”
Rogers wondered whether that was an adequate explanation for such detailed imagery, but felt too rushed by Hourglass’s limited lifespan to pursue the matter further.
A door marked, “Edo 1795” opened and a pair of middle-aged Japanese women came out, wearing what Rogers thought were called “kimonos”. Their faces were painted an astonishing chalk-white. Rogers didn’t know if this were the height of eighteenth century fashion or if the women were some kind of stage performers. They went through the adjoining door, marked “Tokyo 1998”, just as the next door down, labeled “Crystal Tokyo 2966”, was opening. Rogers took in the gleaming silvery bathing suits the two women wore (Rogers thought the two were a bit … overripe … to be wearing such skimpy outfits), then did a double take – they appeared to be the same two women she had just seen in archaic clothes and face-paint.
And she had seen the one door opening, and a hand emerging, while the other door had not yet closed. The women had almost met one another.
A tubby, moustachioed little man in a brown and gray uniform a little bit like those that the “rip hunters” had worn came walking down the corridor. The contrast with the commander of the time-top that had snatched her could not be greater, yet there was something about him that said he, too, was a hero. The two women saw him and greeted him with excited squeals that might have been more suitable to girls half their age.
The man put a hand to his forehead in mock-exasperation (or possibly even real exasperation) and sighed, “Not you pair o’ doxies again! You’re nothing but trouble.” He sounded as though he meant it, but he put up no resistance when each woman took one of his arms and they walked on together, passing Rogers and Hourglass with barely a glance. Rogers noted in passing that the man’s sleeve bore a patch in the form of a fat red spider.
“Look,” Cleo said to Hourglass, but then noticed that they were approaching a much larger doorway, one with an armed guard standing by it. Hourglass spoke a few words to the guard, who nodded and turned to a keypad on the door and entered a code. It opened and the artificial being led Rogers inside.
A tall, thin figure shrouded in a ragged purple cloak stood with its back to Rogers, looking out a window much larger than the ones in the corridor. Rogers approached, not getting too close to the ragged figure, and looked out. This time the view was even more disorienting, since it seemed to be moving. She seemed to be looking out from a window in a building on the back of some immense hairy animal the size of an ocean liner as it moved along a branch on a tree the size of a planet. As she watched her point of view shifting as the animal moved, beginning to feel motion sickness, she saw a fruit hanging from a nearby branch. When she realize that the “fruit” was a world that might have been Earth, she turned away from the window, holding her head.
“Ratatosk, the great squirrel, runs up and down the branches of the World-Tree,” the cloaked figure said hollowly. “One of the stranger ways we have of perceiving the branches of time, but it is good to see that the tree still stands, anyway.”
The figure turned toward Rogers. She could not see its face inside the hood, but she still felt its gaze on her. It stood erect and showed no sign of age or decay, yet it bore a dignity and gravitas like that of the Mongol Emperor, many times over.
“You are Lieutenant Antoinette Rogers,” the creature said. “And I am the Time Being.”
“All praise the Time Being,” Hourglass said at Rogers’ side, and then the construct dissolved, evanescing just as she had promised, leaving behind not so much as a wisp of dust.
Rogers stared at the space where Hourglass had been.
“She still had half an hour to go,” she complained.
“It had served its purpose,” the Time Being said simply.
It offered Rogers a hand wrapped in tattered bandages. Rogers numbly took it, feeling the creature’s thin but powerful fingers.
“I had the devices which are now implanted in your body delivered to the Niagara Gang, and caused them to understand that you should deliver them to the false Emperor. Major Kane gave you the glass containing the construct in order to ensure your survival, and your safe delivery to me.”
The Time Being gestured at the window and it vanished, leaving a smooth expanse of wall in its place. He turned toward the center of the great room, where Rogers now noticed a pair of chairs, one much larger than the other. They sat, the Time Being in the large thronelike chair.
“I am engaged in a great struggle across time, from its earliest moments to its end, and across the vast breadth of parallel and alternate time, with an entity known as the Scarlet Woman. Each of us desires to rule over all of time. The difference is, I wish to maintain the diversity of history’s sweep, while she wishes to create a single culture and a single empire that will persist from the dawn of humanity and survive until the Sun goes out. Also, I seek to protect and preserve the many branches of history, while she wishes to pare the great tree of time down to a single strand.”
He turned and walked past her to a table that she didn’t think had been there a moment before, though its feet were planted in undisturbed dust. He picked up a bottle and blew the dust off it and uncorked it. He turned over a dusty glass and poured red wine into its clean interior. He gestured at a second glass and she nodded.
“She is based at the end of time, in a palace that stands amid the wreckage of Earth’s final city. You were jailed in the dungeons beneath it, where thousands of captives from all eras of history are held.
“There she feeds the last generation of her subjects on wealth she steals from past ages. She reaches back through time to rob one civilization after another, drain it of its natural resources, steal its technology, amuse her decadent followers with its arts and music, kidnap people from past ages to be their slaves.”
Rogers said nothing, merely sipped at her wine, wondering idly what era it had come from, and whether its odd taste even originated in grapes as she understood the word.
“I, for my part, live here in Limbo, outside of time, and reach into it only to support my own organization, taking only what we need and compensating the owners whenever possible.”
Cleo wondered whether the people through the ages who had interacted with the Time Being and the Scarlet Woman would agree with his assessment of their respective groups. She remembered a conversation she’d had once with a French farmer, who’d said that the armies of the Allies and the Central powers behaved in much the same way when they passed over his lands – “Dey say, ‘Horse, give it to me’, ‘Bread, give it to me,’ ‘Money, give it to me’.”
“It is because of our very different attitudes towards history that the emblem of my people is a spider, representing the vast web of time and possibility, while hers is a snake, representing a single span of time.
“Each of us act through agents, most working in place in a single period of history, a few travelling to different eras to work our will. Most of our agents are simply people we have attracted to our service, though each of us are assisted by other kinds of people, like the Time Phantom who impersonated the World Emperor until you unmasked him.”
Rogers shook her head, wondering at the immense scale of this war across time.
“Where did the two of you come from? Do you have a common origin?”
The Time Being shrugged inside his tattered cloak.
“I don’t actually know. My memories are not to be relied upon, especially about the earliest events of my life. What with regenerations and memory implants and the occasional fusion of two different versions of me, it’s hard for me to say with certainty how old I am, or which of my memories are authentically mine. If I remember being a child on the continent of Atlantis some thousands of years before your time, is it a real memory, or a dream? If I recall being a young man on the continent of Zothique some millions of years after, is that me, or the memory of someone whose skill at glider-flying I was implanted with?
“It is possible that the Scarlet Woman and I both originated from the same culture, or the same project. We may have been lovers once. We might even be the same person.”
Even as dazzled as she was by the Time Being’s revelations, that brought Rogers up short.
“I’m sorry; I thought you were a man…?”
“That, too, is subject to change, by various means. Over the eons, the human race has spawned many variants, including hermaphrodites, both protandrous and protogynous. So, I might be fated to grow into the Scarlet Woman, or vice versa.
“Rather than inquire into my origins, though, you might be better served to inquire into your own. Just how do you suppose you came to spend the first part of your life in one millennium, and the second in another?”
“I…I was overcome by gases in an abandoned mine, and lay in a state of suspended animation…didn’t I?”
The Time Being chuckled.
“You have not questioned that story until now, have you?
“You were trapped in that mine, yes. Gases seeped from the walls, yes. Within minutes, you were unconscious. Soon after, you would have been dead, except that a team of my agents rescued you and transported you through time to the year 2419.”
Rogers gasped, and took a stiff drink of her wine. She looked into the darkness inside the Time Being’s hood, trying to meet his unseen eyes.
“And your reason for telling me this story?”
“In no small part, in order to see how you would react. Just as a large part of the purpose you serve in the 25th Century is to see what would happen if I did that – assuming my story is true, that is.”
Rogers rolled her eyes impatiently at that last comment. She got up and started pacing the room, sipping at her wine more cautiously.
“So, what am I to do now? Become part of your staff here in Limbo? Go back to the 20th Century? The 25th?”
The Time Being got up also and began to walk beside her. He restored the window and they looked out at the cosmos together.
“You may return to either period, or to some other if you prefer. You will not serve as my agent, except to the extent that your actions in either century are liable to serve my interests. However….
“What if I told you that, if you return to the 20th Century, you will become the founder of what will become a multi-million dollar aviation company, then a Senator, then President of the United States?
“What if I told you that if you return to the 25th Century, you will die in combat with the Mongols, betrayed by Kane, within a year?”
Rogers swallowed hard.
“Then again, what if I told you that if you choose to resume your life in the 20th Century, you will grow old alone and die forgotten? But if you return to the 25th Century, you will one day be hailed as the Chair of the Supreme Committee for the united planet Earth?”
Rogers smirked.
“Judging from the way you seem to do things, I’m guessing that each of those things happens to me on different branches of time. But it doesn’t matter, does it, because I still have to choose for myself, don’t I?”
She looked out the window, admiring the view, which at this point was a huge bright object like a star, except that smaller objects that also looked like stars were constantly falling into it. She watched until she saw one of the bright objects slip past the window, and saw that it resembled a whirlpool of dots of light, like a whole swarm of stars. She turned away from the window, shaking her head.
“All right. I’ll go back to the 25th Century, and take my chances with the Mongols…and with Kane.”
She stood at attention before the Time Being, waiting for him to give someone an order or turn on a machine, or whatever would be required. She saw the Time Being raise one long finger, and then she was gone.
The hooded creature looked at the space which had once been occupied by Cleo Rogers. He sighed as he began resuming his true form, and wondered whether there really were any such persons as the Time Being and the Scarlet Woman.
[See more Earth-349 stories at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Earth-349]
[Contact the author at dr_psycho1960@hotmail.com]
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