This is a novel I just finished, I hope to get it published. Tell me all what you think of this sample. Open to constructive criticism.
Its a work of superhero fiction set in a universe with some homages to classical comic book characters.

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Chapter 6: Chicago.
For a while Paragon lay in that strange state of being, half-way between sleep and lucidity. It was that odd feeling where he was only half aware of his self and his surroundings. He felt happy and relaxed; he had just slept a restful sleep and dreamed wonderful lucid dreams. In a moment of near-consciousness Paragon’s hand moved across the bed to the where Jade Empress had been but instead of finding a sleeping woman his hand discovered an empty and none-too-warm bed space. What’s more there was a frightful draft in the room due to a window that was wide open.
“She left a while ago, Ted.” Paragon was jolted to his senses by a voice he recognized, the powerful voice of Mister Magnificent.
“Derrick, what the hell?” Paragon sat up in his bed and tried to decide whether he should be angry or just annoyed.
“Sorry, Ted.” Mister Magnificent said with genuine regret. His voice was morose and plaintive as though he had done something terrible and was trying to make amends. He was sitting on a chest-of-drawers, his shoulders turned inward, his back hunched low, and his right hand resting on a nightstand.
“Jesus, Derrick, what time is it?” Paragon looked around for some means of telling the time but there was no wall-clock in his room and his alarm clock had been disconnected when Jade Empress had temporarily ceased being gentle. The clock was on the other end of the room, broken after being smashed against the wall.
“It’s late, Ted, or early depending on how you look at it,” Mister Magnificent said, his face was marked with an almost sallow pallor and his eyes, formerly glorious electric-blue gems now seemed listless and milky. His hair, usually well kept and full now looked messy and wispy, like an old man’s. He was a large man with a robust and muscular frame but his current slumping posture understated this greatly. The shadows of the dark room made his flat, muscular abdomen look flabby and he shook in a way that unnerved Paragon. Paragon had known him for years and in all that time he had never so much as shivered before. He had cried, he had laughed, and he had yelled in anger with such heaven-splitting violence that concrete crumbled and many miles away windows shattered and people were driven temporarily deaf, but he had never shaken like this.
“Derrick, what are you doing here?” Paragon asked, knowing the answer before he even asked. He was there to speak to Paragon, the only person he trusted well enough to confide to.
“Ted, I’m here because I need someone to talk to. I’ve been having trouble of late and you’re the best friend I have, the only real friend I have.” Mister Magnificent’s voice was monotone and low, showing little in the way of any emotion but sadness.
“I heard about your little trip to China.” Paragon replied, not intending for the reply to sound accusative.
“I don’t remember going to China recently, Ted.” Mister Magnificent replied sincerely.
“Well you sure as hell did fly to China.” Paragon answered back.
“I believe you, Ted, I’m sure I did. I just don’t remember it. I’ve been having some problems…” He ran a hand through his white hair and sighed heavily, to Paragon it looked as if he were holding back tears, “I’ve been dealing with missing time.”
“Missing time?” Paragon asked, wondering exactly what that meant.
“I’ll be flying around and it’s the early afternoon then suddenly it’s like I jump ahead in time and it’s the middle of the night and I have this unshakeable feeling I’ve done something terrible. It feels like I’m losing control of my actions, like someone or something else is taking over the wheel.” He sat in shadows, shuddering and nearly sobbing. Paragon didn’t know what to do about it, seeing Mister Magnificent in such a shape was immensely disturbing to him. Mister Magnificent had always been the big brother/father figure to Paragon something that Paragon had been in need of since his father died before he even graduated from high school. Now Mister Magnificent had come for reassurance, and Paragon wasn’t sure he could give it.
“Please calm down, Derrick.” Paragon replied with a firm and assertive tone. Mister Magnificent glared back in response, and his eyes regained some of their customary luster.
“Don’t tell me to calm down!” He crushed the nightstand with a squeeze of his right hand. When he realized what he had done he recoiled in fear and shame, looking back at Paragon apologetically. “Oh God, I’m sorry.” He buried his ageless face in hands that could crush continents and began to weep, first with dry sobs and then with full on tears. Paragon reached out and placed a hand on his friend’s hunched and quaking left shoulder, patting it reassuringly.
“It’s all right, Derrick,” he tried to sound as heartening as possible which was difficult at the moment, “If anyone in this world has earned the right to cry it’s you. You’ve been fighting the good fight for nearly seventy years now without any rest. Who can blame you if after all these years the strain is getting to you?” These words didn’t make Mister Magnificent cheer up but they did stop his crying.
“Ted I’m scared, for the first time in years I’m scared.” Mister Magnificent wiped away tears with the corner of his white cape.
“And you have a right to be scared,” Paragon patted a shoulder that had supported the weight of cities with a gentle hand. Paragon’s ability to instill confidence in his friend was hampered by his own lack of confidence at the moment.
“No, I don’t, Ted,” He answered back, “It’s not my job to feel fear or pain. I’m here to help people, to protect them, to inspire them. That’s my purpose!” His voice was regaining some of its old power as his fear transformed into anger. His anger was directed not at Paragon but at himself for allowing such weakness. Paragon shook his head and tried to pull himself together so that he could pull his friend back together.
“No man has any mandated purpose for being, Derrick, we make our own purposes in life.”
“But I do Ted, why else would I have these powers?” He stared into Paragon’s eyes, hoping that somehow his friend would have a good answer, but Paragon was silent for a long time and Mister Magnificent sunk lower than ever into the mire of depression and doubt.
“You’re overworked and exhausted Derrick,” Paragon answered at length, “Maybe you need to take a vacation, I mean in more than half a century you’ve played the hero and never once got to be a normal person.”
“How can I take a vacation, Ted?” Mister Magnificent asked.
“Surely you’ve earned one,” Paragon said, “Besides nearly all of the world’s super-criminals are either buried in the ground or locked away in an Oubliette of some sort. There’s never been a better time to take a break. Even God rested for a day.” Paragon hoped that at least some of this was getting through to his friend.
“I’m not God Ted, but that’s not to say that I don’t feel like it sometimes. If I stop fighting for even a day, I have a terrible feeling that the world will fall apart completely like a model airplane without glue.”
“A world that depends on a single man to survive is a world that doesn’t deserve to survive.” Paragon answered firmly.
“Maybe, maybe you’re right, Ted. But even if I do take a break, disappear for a little while it won’t guarantee that the problem will be cured. Do you know how it feels, Ted?” He turned to his friend, for the first time Paragon got a good look at his face, a tired world-weary face.
“What are you talking about, what exactly is It?” Paragon asked, uncertain of what his friend was talking about.
“Do you know how it is to hear a kid drop a cereal spoon half a mile away as if it were ten feet away? Do you know how much restraint it takes to shake a man’s hand gently when without any effort at all you could crush a diamond? Do you know how it feels to be the most powerful man on the planet and not be in control of your actions?” Paragon like so many others had never truly thought about how difficult it must have been for Mister Magnificent to interact with other people without hurting them; he had always taken it for granted that he did interact with others and that no one was ever injured. Now the notion of an out of control superbeing seemed terrifying, even apocalyptic.
“No, I suppose I don’t.” Paragon admitted humbly, unable to give a rebuttal.
“I think I’ve robbed you of enough sleep Ted, I’m sorry,” Mister Magnificent cast looked through the open window dejectedly and stood up to leave.
“Where are you going?” Paragon asked.
“I don’t know.” Mister Magnificent answered with a worried expression and a shaky intonation in his voice.

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Chapter 9: Okefenokee Swampland, Georgia.
For a man who was for a large portion of his time heavier than a tank a swamp wasn’t a very nice place to be. The Guardian hated swamps, and bogs, and fens, and quagmires, and any other collection of vegetation, mud, and stagnant water. It wasn’t just because he was constantly sinking into the mud and water; a large part of the problem was the bugs. Now they couldn’t very well sting or bite him for even at his ‘powered-down’ moments his skin was a hard and durable as rhino hide, but they could still annoy him in many other no less vexing ways. He hated to have little flies and gnats buzzing and flitting through his ears for just a fleeting second, he hated to have flies land in his hair, and he hated the rare occasions when flying insects would land in his ears and make noises. It was almost as if they felt frustrated about not being able to bite him so they decided to compensate for this by making little noises in his ears. The fact that he was by birth a southern man and thus used to it did nothing to lessen its impact. His place of birth wasn’t far from the Okefenokee Swamp; he was born north of Gainesville, Florida in a little town surrounded by pine woods teeming with mosquitoes and flies. But a swamp is a much less hospitable place than a forest. The Guardian was after bigger bugs though, one of the biggest of them all in fact. There were few super-beings that evoke such terror and fear as did the creature known simply as Demon. A twisted caricature of humanity, a hulking monstrosity, and a mindless murderer aimlessly wandering the world looking for something he would never find. To look upon Demon was usually a death sentence, indeed there were cases of people dying of fright and/or shock merely by virtue of seeing the creature, and those who recovered from the initial shock were usually petrified by fear and made easy targets for the rampaging abomination. The Guardian had heard numerous different stories that had attempted to explain the creature’s origins, many of them clichés and ridiculous folktales. The most popular explanation (and the one that the Guardian was most inclined to believe) was that he was some kind of government experiment to replicate superhuman powers gone horribly, horribly wrong. Another popular explanation was that it was an alien creature dropped on Earth, either as a means to conquer it or simply because the aliens in question wanted to get rid of it. The second theory never made any sense to the Guardian, if the aliens wanted to get rid of it why not dump it on any of the other uninhabited planets nearby? The third popular theory held that Demon was exactly what his name suggested: that he was a real flesh and blood demon sent to plague humanity. The Guardian didn’t believe that theory though he did feel it still held more water than the second. After all Demon was in most ways much, much worse than any demon he had ever heard or read about in fiction or mythology. He had been defeated time and time again by various heroes but each time he had returned, completely healed from his previous defeat and more powerful than ever. When he first surfaced in Los Angles he was bullet-proof and strong enough to toss around buses but Avenger was able to incapacitate him after a long battle by frying him with the entire output of Los Angeles’ power-grid. He got up again after a half hour and would have over-whelmed Avenger but for the arrival of Mister Magnificent who defeated him with a single punch. Now at this point he was considered an Alpha threat, there was even talk of making him an Omega threat. To put that in perspective there had only ever been one realized Omega threat: the entire Legion led by the Polar-Man. Alpha threats were defined as threats that could destabilize or destroy entire regions or even nations, Omega threats were threats to the entire world. Demon reappeared some months after every ‘death’ in another part of the world, usually but not always with a massive power boost though at times he would reappear with a reduction in power, it really seemed to depend on a number of factors including how bad of a mood he was in at the time. An angry Demon was practically unstoppable not that Demon was ever that calm to begin with. In one particularly notable occasion he appeared in Beijing and took on the entire Chinese Superhuman force at once and would have won if not for the intervention of Mister Magnificent. The Chinese Government made a onetime exception and allowed a foreign hero onto their soil to stop the menace. The Guardian didn’t know if he could win by himself, but he wasn’t about to call for help, he had to prove himself and face the fear. Every step that the Guardian took compounded his apprehension, he knew that Demon was in the swamplands, that he was nearby, but there was no sign of him. The swamp was eerily silent and still, undisturbed by even the sounds of distant human activities. When Demon moved in everyone moved out and literally ran for the hills. Now it was just the swamp, the Guardian, and Demon. The Guardian took a careful step on a large half sunken log, making sure not to slip or fall over, or worse still sink into the water and have to struggle with his own weight to get out. As he moved through the mire there was but one thought on his mind: how did something as massive and destructive as Demon keep from being detected? Then he got his answer. It was hard to describe what he saw, it looked impossible. The Guardian witnessed a carpet of mud and packed vegetation rolling through the swamp, knocking over saplings and uprooting any tree that got in its way. It reminded him of a shark moving through the ocean, only this wasn’t the ocean: it was a thick soup of saturated soil and plant matter. So great was Demon’s strength that it he pushed through the swamp with as much difficulty as a swimmer through water. And then with all the fury befitting his name Demon erupted from the swamp, his horrific maw bellowing a cacophonous call that made the Guardian shudder. Demon was less a person and more a primordial walking representative of terror. He stood (or rather hunched) at well over sixteen feet and couldn’t have weighed less than ten tons. One of its most horrifying qualities was its skin, or lack thereof, people who subscribed to the failed super-soldier theory like to say that the muscle expansion of the human subject actually caused the skin to split and fall off like a growing snake’s hide. There were areas where the bones had developed outward and protruded through the muscle creating bony growths that were horrifying to behold. Then there was its head, a skull shaped mass of muscle and two undersized eyes. Its lower jaw jutted out giving it a horrendous under-bite, and its spine was clearly visible from its back. Paragon had once used the word eldritch to describe it, and eldritch was correct, what else can you call a beast with such qualities? The Guardian always had the belief that the creature was so violent because it was constantly in pain and practically brain-dead, unable to understand anything beyond that constant pain. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t cunning, it knew who the Guardian was, what the Guardian was. It knew that the Guardian was too formidable a foe to simply charge at like a rampant predator, so instead it swam through the swamp to ambush its prey. The stratagem half worked, the Guardian was already in a fighting stance when Demon attacked but the Guardian was by no means prepared for the fight. An earth shattering swipe of the monstrosity’s red-meat paw propelled the Guardian through an old rotten tree and straight into a shallow pool of tepid water. Blood trickled down from his nose and mixed with the contents of the pool. The Guardian gasped and swallowed dirty water, looking up in shock as the deceptively swift and agile beast leapt toward him with the intent to stomp his face in. The Guardian pushed himself off the ground with all the strength he had, creating two small craters where his hands had shoved off from, and braced himself for impact. Demon splashed down with an immense force akin to a meteorite entering the atmosphere. The beast’s clawed right foot came down first and the Guardian said a short prayer as he moved both his hands to catch the foot. And catch it he did, the impact of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object always has the same effect: the immediate surroundings of said force and object are obliterated. Shockwaves ripped old trees from the ground and waters that had been stagnant for years surged and cascaded in a radial pattern, knocking over and uprooting shrubs and grasses. Acting quickly the Guardian swung Demon by his foot, around and around several times before releasing him to become gravity’s plaything. Demon was sent careening into a small island comprised of roots and shrubs, but being the great terror that he was, he immediately recovered and came back for more. The Guardian decided to utilize a perennial favorite: what Avenger referred to as “tree-fu”. He uprooted a venerable old Cypress tree and gripped it in his large hands like if it were his childhood Louisville Baseball bat and got ready for the “pitch”. The pitch arrived in the form of a sixteen foot tall monster with murderous intent. The Guardian swung as hard as he could, splintering the tree on Demon’s face but doing little to stop his charge. Demon slashed the improvised weapon apart and the Guardian wished he was in a city, that way he could throw cars at him or hit him with street-lights, those wouldn’t splinter so easily. The club was not intended to stop Demon, only slow him down to give the Guardian a chance to get “powered-up”. Now at full invulnerability, mass, and strength the Guardian was prepared to use good-old fashioned fists to stop his enemy, so was Demon, he was always ready for that. Demon’s face met the Guardian’s right fist while the Guardian’s stomach met Demon’s left jab. Demon had two primary advantages in this fight: firstly was his lack of fear, and secondly was his reach. The Guardian couldn’t just slug it out with his opponent, he had to fight smart and use every advantage his environment offered him. It was at this point that he wished that he had Avenger coaching him; she was a master at using her surroundings to defeat enemies who were vastly more powerful than she was, that’s how she defeated Demon the first time he was spotted by fighting smart. Demon’s claws came down like lightning on the Guardian’s exposed back, easily shredding his clothing and tearing through his skin. The Guardian answered back with a bone splitting punch to Demon’s ribcage. He could hear the sound of multiple ribs splitting and breaking like firewood. Demon put his hands together and like a hammer brought them down on the Guardian’s head, then catching said head’s chin on his knee. The Guardian tore away from his opponent and tried to keep from spinning. He counted the Demon’s renewed charge with a charge of his own, pushing aside the clawed hands and hammering the putrid visage with a flurry of punches strong enough to grind down mountains. Boiling hot blood streamed from Demon’s face, but he was a juggernaut with a healing factor that made his invulnerability seem redundant and unnecessary. A savage head-butt broke up the Guardian’s barrage and laid him out on his back, Demon followed up with an onslaught of stomps to the Guardian’s chest and face. A swift and crushing strike from the Guardian stopped his right leg mid-stomp and tore Demon’s leg open, exposing bone and flesh and causing Demon to lose his balance. The Guardian saw his opportunity to remove his opponent from the battlefield when Demon’s foot left the ground. Superhumans with super-strength and super-durability also had supernatural traction and inertia meaning that they could resist being moved so long as their body touched the ground regardless of their mass. No one really knew how it worked but it made it so that so long as someone like the Guardian or Demon kept their feet on the ground they could withstand earth-shattering blows without moving regardless of their body mass. But now that Demon was in the air the Guardian put all of his raw strength and power into a single punch to Demon’s gut. The result was a streaking red projectile travelling at an enormous velocity to the upper atmosphere. The Guardian knew that stranding him in Low Earth Orbit wasn’t a permanent fix, but then when dealing with someone like Demon nothing was a permanent fix. All you could do was remove him from the field for a little while, bury him underground or burn him and hope that he wouldn’t regenerate. But he always regenerated.

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if anyone has any comments I'd be glad to hear them.

WOW!!! THAT WAS AMAZING!!!!! I loved the fight discriptions in that, and your description of Demond was excellent. I liked your use of vocabulary. My only sudjestion is that you try to remove the /'s in the story. Oh, and maybe giving chapter nine some paragraphs. But I am totally impressed by that, no I wan to read the rest of it!!!

thanks, I'll post the first five chapters here:

Chapter 1: Arctic Circle.

The Polar-Man held his small silver mirror with care not to break it. He had strength enough to tear a cruise ship in half so a fragile silver mirror was to him what a robin’s egg was to a growing child who had yet to understand his own strength. He held his hand over the left side of the mirror so that only the right side of his face was reflected. He struggled not to be vain in his appreciation of the right side of his face. It was a thing of beauty, a strong jaw line that despite being buried under a thick white beard was still instantly apparent, a sharp and well constructed nose, and of course a thick and full head of white hair. But when he moved his hand away from the surface of the mirror he scowled in disgust and revulsion. Where his left eye should be there was instead an empty socket, an open pit of revolting red flesh that in his mind was the sole defect on his otherwise immaculate visage. Behind him he caught a glimpse in the mirror of his little pet Arctic Fox Halcyon scurrying through the lab. Halcyon was the only other living thing within miles of the Polar-Man and was the only other creature he cared about in the world. The Polar-Man didn’t care to wonder how Halcyon had gotten out of his room. He had two things on his mind at the time. Firstly what was he to do about the eye, a prosthetic of course, but what kind? Should he go for function or form? Should it be an inert but old fashioned and stately glass eye or should it be mechanical with multiple modes of vision and enhanced swivel? And if so should he go for symmetry and replace the other eye? No that would be foolish. The second thing that inhabited his mind and occupied his thoughts was revenge. Revenge on Mister Magnificent for taking his eye, for humiliating him, for depriving him of his legitimate business empire, and for defeating his short-lived army of super-criminals and super-terrorists: his Legion. The Legion was doomed to fail from the start, however. The Polar-Man knew this more than anyone but they were at least supposed to accomplish one major victory before falling victim to infighting and petty bickering. The Polar-Man’s only qualm about his chosen profession was that he was seemingly the only sane one that he knew of. That was primarily because the criminal underworld was a world that accepted no failures and the only way to thrive in it was by either being more powerful than everyone else, smarter than everyone else, or crazier than everyone else. The Polar-Man had the first two in spades and the third one as well (depending on who you ask).

The outcome of the battle had been disastrous for his kind. Around thirty percent of them were killed while the remainder had been either confirmed captured or had gone missing. Still the Legion was not a total failure. Its very existence alone had provided enough motivation for the three major world powers (who were engaged in a Cold War that had been edging precariously closer to a shooting war) to strike up a truce and set aside their differences to defeat the mutual threat. That alone guaranteed the Polar-Man’s place in history, but he still wanted more. If only he had killed Mister Magnificent, he would be remembered for all eternity. Mister Magnificent had been the deciding factor in the conflagration that had erupted between the Polar-Man’s legion and the combined forces of the Chinese, American, and EU military forces and their superhuman assets. Before he arrived the combined forces that opposed the Polar-Man were faltering and being ground down under the might of hundreds of superhumans. Then Mister Magnificent arrived and like a swift and brutal northern wind he extinguished the morale of the Legion. There were a few of the super criminals and terrorists that had already begun their retreat the second his name was uttered. The Polar-Man engaged him in single combat and in front of tens of thousands of witnesses Mister Magnificent promptly gouged out his eye and hurled him to the ground. Such direct methods weren’t the hero’s M.O. Something was different about him, that was certain. It had been the case for the last several years, Mister Magnificent was changing. He had never thrown his foes around with such disregard for their safety, nor had he ever been so late to an emergency. The Polar-Man didn’t know what to make of it at this point but as always whenever there was a change in the status quo there was an opportunity for the Polar-Man. Outside of his fortress a storm was brewing, the snowflakes and ice crystals that flurried and looped around as the wind demanded reminded him of why he had selected such an inhospitable location for his lair.

Above all else the Polar-Man was an admirer of beauty, but beauty took many forms for him. There was functional beauty, the beauty of such things as insects and machines, and then there was beauty of form, the beauty of such things as snowflakes, his pet Halcyon, his silver mirror, and of course himself. Over the years he had grown accustomed to wearing his costume, so much so that he was more comfortable in it than in normal clothing. His costume had a white and silver theme to it and consisted of heavy plates of overlapping armor made from exotic metals strong enough to withstand the most powerful industrial chemical lasers. Over this armor he was wrapped up in warm white cloths that looked like they were made from wool but were in fact made from synthetic spider silk that had been combined with varying chemicals that rendered them almost as powerful as the armor they concealed. It would be over-reaching, however, to say that the costume was truly meant for protection. The Polar-Man’s invulnerable skin could shrug of tank shells without so much as a red mark and his softest parts could outperform tungsten or titanium alloys in durability tests. Most of the items on the short list of things that could actually break his skin were absolutely useless when it came to the muscle underneath that skin. He was in excellent shape but that had less to do with his practical concerns such as strength or stamina (the nature of his powers made it so that no matter what shape he was in he could perform roughly the same feats) but with his vanity. Vanity he knew had been his undoing, his need to shine, his need for recognition. For years the Legion had operated underground successfully without anyone (including major intelligence agencies) being any the wiser. Then the first week they went public they were beaten down by the combined force of three military superpowers and nearly two hundred superheroes. The design for the new eye was developing well despite the fact that he had only just begun working on it half an hour ago. The Polar-Man chuckled to himself. If he put his mind to it he could probably cure AIDS and Cancer in less than a week. But what would he gain from that? The Polar-Man’s other power besides his immense strength, invulnerability, and flight was his mind. He was perhaps the world’s most gifted scientist and in his mind God’s gift to the world.

He liked to think of himself as something of a Sherlock Holmes but in his heart he knew he was a Moriarty. The design of his new prosthetic eye went from imagination to theory to reality in less than an hour. He uploaded it into a small disk and with a simple action he inserted it into his mechanical raven servant, Huginn. There were simpler and more practical ways of transporting the information but the Polar-Man loved such eccentricities. After all if he only cared about practicality he wouldn’t even wear a costume. The little metal and plastic bird flew away from its perch and down the corridor to the other lab, the lab where the Polar-Man did all of his manufacturing. The Polar-Man sometimes wished he had henchmen or dedicated assistants of some kind but then he remembered he had terrible people skills, which went a long way in explaining why the Legion wouldn’t have lasted long. Soon his new eye would be ready and he would begin planning anew for there were always opportunities for him, always.

Chapter 2: Deterrence Headquarters, Virginia.

It was a strange sight to be sure, heroes acting like normal people, or at least as normal as they could act given their nature. They had just returned from a funeral, a funeral for friends and team-mates. A funeral that was open to the public but was in spirit a private affair for heroes only. The three heroes were Spirit, Arrowhead, and Diamondback, the first with the power to turn intangible, the second with the power to run at tremendous speeds, and the third with the power to turn his skin into an almost impenetrable rock-like substance. The citizens could look at the brightly clothed corpses and some of them could even cry but they didn’t have any special tether to them. The other heroes however had a serious and important connection with their fallen comrades. And for one of the few times they showed their humanity by marching slowly and quietly through the parting crowds and back into their Headquarters.

There were four of them, two women and two men. At their head was the hero Paragon, a veteran hero who had been in the hero business for decades. He had control over electromagnetism and the ability to fly by manipulating said forces. His costume was orange-and-white themed, conservative, and functional with armored plates protecting his shoulders, chest, and back and a helmet that allowed him to see special EM signatures. His most important uses of his powers were to manipulate and control ferrous metals and to create powerful EM shields that could easily deflect bullets and stop a speeding train dead. His cape was long but didn’t get in the way and didn’t limit his mobility. Next was Avenger, the only one of them who wore black to the funeral. She was tall and well built with long black hair that she would wear up when “doing her thing”. She was an expert martial artist and a lover of various gadgets to help her on the job. Some of these she designed herself but for the most part they were purchased or cobbled together by various firms with an interest in having their technology field tested. She augmented this with her superpower, the ability to absorb ambient visible light and convert it into pure power and also use it as a protective force for her body. At full absorption in broad daylight she could amass sufficient power to lift a midsized SUV over her head. This absorption had another, very important, side effect: it robbed her surroundings of light.

Back in Los Angeles when criminals want to frighten one another, they tell Avenger stories. Behind her was the Guardian, a massive man with the ability to alter his density and mass as well as the ability to command gravitic forces. He was a young man with less than ten years of experience under his belt but he had the potential to be one of the greatest heroes of all time, at least that’s what Paragon always said. He wore a costume that did nothing to hide his identity (he was too large to be considered “normal looking” in civilian guise anyway) and had a black and gray theme. At the rear was the youngest member of the team, Bombshell. Her name referred firstly to her power, the ability to create, magnify, and control explosive forces, and it referred secondly to her physique and her blonde hair. She wasn’t more than a week over twenty-three years old and had just joined the team a few years ago. She wore a somewhat-revealing get-up consisting of tight pants that hugged her hips and a top that left her midriff exposed. The assembled men in the crowd tried not to stare too much as she walked past them. After a slow and ponderous walk through the parted crowd that seemed to last for hours they returned to their Headquarters closing the door on the crowds outside. From the courtyard the assembled masses of civilians could only wonder what they were doing inside. As the door shut behind her Avenger removed her cowl and tossed it to the floor.

“God it’s maddening wearing that thing all day.” She said.
“You should try wearing a helmet all day, a ten pound helmet with absolutely no ventilation.” Paragon replied.
“I still can’t believe they’re gone.” Said Bombshell from the back of the group, even though she had only known the dead heroes for a relatively short time she was unaccustomed to death and had already begun to form attachments to them.
“Trust me kid,” Said Paragon while removing his helmet, “When you’ve been a hero as long as I have this sort of thing becomes commonplace. That’s not to say it ever gets any easier, but you have to learn how to push through the sadness and remember what you’re here for, to help people.”
“Tell that to the Government,” sneered Avenger, “They seem to think we’re nothing more than weapons to crush their enemies. It’s the same all over.”
“Forgive me, Lorena, but that is weapons-grade bullshit.” Said Paragon, relieved to be out of his helmet.
“Well the three corpses outside could have fooled me.” Avenger replied.
“Hey now,” the Guardian moved between them in an attempt to diffuse the tension, “In case you forgot Lorena this is the time for mourning, not for arguing about principles.”
“Argue? Who’s arguing? Why would I argue with Paragon? After all he’s always right,” Said Avenger sarcastically, “Aren’t you Ted?” She asked Paragon.

“It’s not that I’m always right, it’s just that you’re usually wrong.” Paragon replied dryly.
“Hey guys,” Bombshell interjected, “I don’t mean to break up your little dispute but does anyone know why Mister Magnificent didn’t show up?” The others turned to face her as if she had asked an incredibly stupid question.
“He’s probably busy doing something else, saving a kid in Australia from Dingoes, or throwing some gigantic monster into the sun.” Avenger replied matter-of-factly.
“I don’t think so,” replied Paragon, “There aren’t any natural disasters going on right now, and as you know 99% of all super-threats are either dead or imprisoned. I think he didn’t show up because of personal issues.”
“He has been pretty distant for the last few weeks,” The Guardian admitted.
“Weeks?” Paragon raised an eyebrow, “For the last decade he’s been less and less attentive and more distant, it’s only now that it’s affected his performance. None of you were around forty years ago when I first began my career. Mister Magnificent back then, well…” Paragon smiled, “He was magnificent, he saved my life a dozen times before the decade was up and he always had something nice to say, to anyone he met. And he never did anything wrong to his enemies once they were beaten, no matter what sort of crimes they committed, or what they tried to do to him. Diamondback was one of his old foes. After being defeated time and time again by Mister Magnificent and being treated with mercy and compassion each time Diamondback was inspired to stop committing crimes and serve on the side of the angels, so to speak. What Mister Magnificent did to the Polar-Man shook me to the core, he would have never even thought of gouging out an opponent’s eye, no matter who it was.”
“That asshole had it coming, if I get the chance I’ll take his other eye.” Avenger spat. She had personal reasons for hating the Polar-Man.

“Whether or not he deserved it isn’t the question,” Paragon countered, “The question is why Mister Magnificent would do it. Would you really feel safe if someone with powers like Mister Magnificent had your approach to dealing with the world’s problems?” He asked Avenger. Avenger was stunned by the idea and after a short few seconds she answered.
“No.”
“I thought so,” Paragon said.
“Well why do you think he’s been acting like that?” the Guardian asked Paragon.
“He’s probably tired, sleep-deprived; I mean if you were constantly saving people across the world wouldn’t you be exhausted?” Bombshell said. Paragon merely shook his head.
“He’s not tired in the sense that an insomniac is. Mister Magnificent doesn’t need sleep, or food, or water, or air for that matter. He’s flown to the sun and back for God’s sake. There’s a good reason why he’s called Mister Magnificent you know,” Paragon said, “If he has any sort of fatigue, it’s purely spiritual in nature. I would say it’s a mid-life crisis, but he’s immortal so that’s clearly not what’s going on.”
“Then what is it?” Avenger asked.
“I don’t know,” Paragon replied. There was a considerable amount of consternation apparent in both his expression and in his words.


Chapter 3: South China Sea.

The Chinese Air force had already been scrambled when the small blip on the Radar had passed over the Luzon Strait. The Radar operators, men with little training in any subject beyond operating a Radar station were dumbstruck when at approximately 06:37 Beijing-time a tiny signature had appeared on their long-range scan, travelling at well over Mach 9. They quickly poured over their identification charts to see what sort of craft could perform at that speed. They found their answer when their commanding officer pointed out that the small size of the blip meant it was either a heretofore unknown hyper-sonic stealth aircraft or a man flying at hyper-sonic velocity. It was over the calm and placid waters of the South China Sea that two small blips on a Radar screen began converging at a startling rate. Chinese super-heroine Jade Empress was a veteran of ten years in the People’s Superhuman Force, the largest superhuman force in the world, and the most powerful branch of the Chinese Military.

She was a wonderful tool of propaganda for the Chinese Government, considered to be the ideal woman: beautiful, intelligent, powerful, and above all else loyal. The PRC tried to convince the people that she and Dragon were lovers and the ideal Chinese couple though their real relationship was a professional one, with Dragon as the Commander of the PSF and Jade Empress as his trusted Lieutenant. Jade Empress had mid-length jet-black hair and a costume that differed greatly from her fellow Chinese heroes’ military garb. She was scantily clad to say the least; with what was little more than a “metal-bikini” as many called it. The reason for her incongruous costume was primarily a move by the Chinese government to show her beauty and grace which they felt the standard uniform would have obscured and hindered. Jade Empress had encountered many threats throughout the years, but none were as great as the prospect of Mister Magnificent encroaching on Chinese territory. Why he crossed the Pacific Jade Empress did not know, what she did know was that she had been ordered to stop him any way she could. She had struggled not to balk when the command was handed down to her by the General Secretary himself. The edict was the equivalent of ordering a sickly child to fight off a starving bear. Jade Empress was powerful but Mister Magnificent was on a whole other level of power. She stopped flying when the western horizon started swallowing the coastline. Jade Empress hovered over the surface of the ocean at an altitude of half a kilometer, awaiting the arrival of her ‘guest’. He appeared first as a small dot on the horizon, but within less than a second he had closed the vast distance and was standing no more than ten feet away from Jade Empress. He was a large, powerfully built man with an immaculately sculpted physique akin to a classical Hellenic statue and the ageless face of an Adonis. Like all of the “immortals” (the most powerful of heroes like Paragon and the Polar-Man) he had hair that was snow-white and a face that could have been anywhere from twenty-five to forty years of age. His costume was the product of decades of refinement and modulation that had gradually yielded something that both captured attention and commanded respect, like a well tailored officer’s uniform or the battle-dress of some great Emperor of old. It consisted of ceramic leg armor that covered the entire lower half of his body with a white and Prussian-blue scheme to it, sleeveless white chest armor with a stylized blue ‘M’ in the center, platinum arm braces at his wrists, and a long flowing white cape attached to a single platinum pauldron on his left shoulder. His eyes were an unnatural blue that reminded everyone who may have thought otherwise that he was anything but a normal human. Though his appearance was awe-inspiring Jade Empress was not about to waste time staring stupidly at him, she had a job to do.

“Mister Magnificent, what the hell are you doing here?” She asked in a flat all-business tone that was stripped of all emotions. She didn’t want to sound overly aggressive but she also had to avoid even the slightest suggestion of weakness.
“Why simple,” He replied, “I’m here to see you.” His voice was smooth and pleasant but also inhumanly resonant. It wasn’t bombastic, it was heroic. His Mandarin Chinese was impeccable and practically devoid of a foreign accent; he had had many years to learn dozens of languages to aid him in his self appointed task of protecting the world.
“What do you want to see me for?” She asked, perturbed by his interest in her. Mister Magnificent laughed and closed his eyes meditatively, advancing toward Jade Empress slowly and smoothly. As he came closer Jade Empress felt her fists tense up, her body coiling in preparation for hand-to-hand combat. Jade Empress’s heart was practically beating out of her chest in response to Mister Magnificent’s encroachment. His face came within only a few inches of Jade Empress’s but he stopped short of her. There were so many different emotions stirring in her, fear, excitement, and confusion being most prominent of all.

“I come to ask if any of that propaganda is true, about you and Dragon.” His hand reached out to touch her, brushing aside a lock of Jade Empress’s jet-black hair. Jade Empress wasn’t sure what was going on, the event was unprecedented.
“What’s it to you?” She asked, in a “back-off” sort of tone meant to dissuade him. Mister Magnificent paid no mind to her tone or her stance, sensing her excitement and hearing the pounding of her heart like the beat of a drum.
“Just wondering, I mean you’re an amazing woman. And Dragon…” He trailed off without finishing though it was obvious what he was doing.
“I’ve been ordered to turn you back, you know.” Jade Empress said in an attempt to alleviate her discomfort and remind herself of her mission. As the most powerful woman in China the feeling of vulnerability was foreign and massively unsettling to her, it was a sensation she hadn’t experienced since before her powers developed in her mid-teens.
“And are you going to turn me around?” Mister Magnificent asked while stroking her cheek with his index and middle fingers. Softly, gently and tenderly his fingers slid up and down her face and at once Jade Empress felt both revulsion and rapture. Mister Magnificent had an indescribable aura that had Jade Empress partly entranced.

“If she won’t then I will!” A voice interrupted Mister Magnificent’s overture, a booming voice that could have shattered windows. Mister Magnificent tilted his head ever so slightly just in time to see Dragon, China’s most powerful super-being, hit him with a left hook to the face. The attack elicited little more than an amused grunt from the Man of Might. Dragon was often described as looking like Bruce Lee, if Bruce Lee was three inches taller and had a flat-top military haircut. Unlike most of his fellow superhumans in the PSF Dragon had actually been a soldier before. When his powers first began to manifest at the age of twenty he was a Corporal in the People’s Liberation Army stationed in Taipei Province. Mister Magnificent recovered almost instantly and caught Dragon’s two follow-up punches without much trouble.
“Ah Dragon, we were just talking about you. You’re ears must be burning,” Dragon attempted in vain to break out of his opponent’s grip but it was a futile effort, Mister Magnificent had him by the wrists and with his vastly superior strength Dragon was practically at his mercy. A powerful head-butt from the older hero sent Dragon crashing down into the water below. Dragon sustain a broken nose and sore reddened wrists, but the greatest injury sustained he sustained was to his pride. Mister Magnificent had been distracted from his original goal by Dragon’s interruption and the moment was in his mind killed. The hero looked at Jade Empress again wistfully and after a moment of consideration and a thorough visual scan of her person he left with a few parting words for Jade Empress. “Remember honey, if you ever feel like being with a real man, look me up!” Dragon emerged from the water some short time after Mister Magnificent’s departure. He was enraged and humiliated but otherwise his injuries were superficial. Nothing was hurt save his pride and his nose but with time both of those would heal.


Chapter 4: San Francisco.

It was a small but trendy Sushi-bar in San Francisco, one of many to call the city home. Its patrons were what one would expect: primarily yuppies. Except for when two very odd people entered the building. They were not odd in any negative sense, quite the opposite; there was an unreal quality about them, a sense of importance. One was a man who could have been any age between twenty and fifty, a handsome and healthy looking man who had the body and face of a young man but carried himself in a manner suggestive of decades of experience. He was blond with hazel eyes and a strong chin with some scant stubble present but only visible at certain angles with the right lighting. The other was a woman who stood a head taller than the man; she was Asian though none of the patrons would venture a guess as to what kind of Asian for fear of sounding racially insensitive. As a result of her stunning beauty, as she moved the heads of the male patrons followed her. The man while still a handsome man was comparatively less striking, leading some of the men to make quiet jibes wondering how he ever ended up with her. The couple took a table off in the corner of the bar so as to be away from other patrons. There was a short period of time when the other patrons stared blankly at the couple but after a minute passed, they all returned to what they were doing and left the couple alone. The couple sat quietly for a while until a waiter came, the woman said nothing, but the man produced a small piece of paper intended for the head chef. The waiter was a little confused but agreed to take it to him. Within a few short minutes a full plate of sushi was taken to the table, compliments of the house.

“So do heroes eat for free here?” the woman asked. The woman was indeed none other than Jade Empress.
“No,” Paragon replied, “Just me, I saved the owner’s life a few years ago, long story.”
“You’ll have to tell me it some day.” Jade Empress replied picking up a sushi roll with her chopsticks and sliding it into her mouth in a slow and almost suggestive fashion. Paragon smiled.
“You know I still feel strange about this, about us I mean,” He said. He couldn’t keep from staring at her glossy red lips. Paragon was amused at the dissonance between how the world saw her and how he saw her, beautiful yes, compassionate yes, but chaste? He felt part-ways ashamed about what in his view was robbing the cradle; Paragon was old enough to be her father or even her young grandfather.
“What’s to feel strange about Ted?” She asked, playfully mussing his hair.
“Oh nothing…just that I’m more than twice your age, that’s all,” He replied, “There’s nothing creepy about it at all.”
“You don’t look a year over thirty.” Jade Empress answered.

“I may look young but don’t forget I went to High School during the Nixon years. I first wore a cape when computers were the size of this sushi bar. I remember drinking Coke from green bottles for the love of God.”
“You can perform, that’s all that matters.” Jade Empress giggled.
“So those clothes of yours…” Paragon began, staring at her manicured nails, quite incongruous with her line of work.
“What about them?” Jade Empress was wearing her hair up with sticks and wore a tight red Cheongsam-like dress that had immediately won her the attention and admiration of every man and the jealousy and ire of every woman in the bar. The dress left her shoulders and most of her back exposed but Jade Empress was used to having a naked back.
“Well they’re a little risqué don’t you think?” he asked with a chuckle, “I can practically tell your cup size.”
“Sweetie, you’re talking to a woman who spends three-quarters of her time wearing a Green-metal bikini, by comparison these clothes are like a burqa.” She replied, eating another roll of Sushi. “Credit where it’s due this is good Sushi. I used to go to little bars in Japan but who can afford that?”

“Never been to Japan, in all my years of being a hero Japan is probably the one major country I’ve never been to though apparently I have a bigger fan base there than Mister Magnificent. Speaking of Mister Magnificent, I understand that there was a little encounter between you and him yesterday.” Paragon noted.
“Yes,” she replied with a tinge of discomfort in her voice, “I never knew he could be so… boorish.”
“I didn’t think so either; I mean coming so close to Chinese territory and assaulting Dragon?” Paragon had a measure of disbelief in his voice.
“To be fair Dragon threw the first punch, I don’t think Mister Magnificent would have done anything to hurt me. But I’ll never look at him the same way again.”
“How did you look at him before?” Paragon asked.
“I suppose since I was a child we were told not to trust him, but all that he ever did was good. He always seemed like a God to me, flying higher and faster than any other hero, always saving the day in the end, and always doing it with a smile on his face. Now I don’t know what to think of him, he was acting like… well… like Dragon actually.”
“Head-strong, hotheaded, and arrogant?” Paragon offered.
“No, pig-headed,” Jade Empress replied. Paragon could tell that there she had some mild contempt for Dragon which she barely tried to conceal.

“How do you manage to retain the illusion that you and Dragon are an item?” Paragon asked.
“I don’t do anything, the mere fact that I stand next to Dragon at every photo-op seems to confirm the imagined coupling in the minds of most people in the world.” Jade Empress said with a sigh.
“I wonder how the Chinese news will spin Dragon’s injuries.” Paragon said wistfully.
“They’ll probably spin it so that Mister Magnificent was the one that was injured and that Dragon stood triumphant in a short bout to protect the glorious People’s Republic from the villainous Mister Magnificent.”
“I’m just glad Derrick, err… Mister Magnificent didn’t hurt you.” Paragon sputtered.
“You don’t have to worry about me,” she said, “I can take care of myself.”
“When it comes to a man who can split the Moon in two with his bare hands no one can take care of themselves.” Paragon mused.

Chapter 5: Chicago.


Paragon was exhausted by the end of the day and the fact that he had to fly back home half-way across the country didn’t help things one bit. Of course he couldn’t naturally and intuitively fly like Jade Empress, Dragon, or Mister Magnificent but what he could do is “pull” himself through the air by controlling the metal parts of his suit and essentially throwing himself from one place to another. It required a lot of focus and concentration on Paragon’s part to keep from slipping up and plunging to his death. Though he wore civilian clothes, Paragon always wore a metal harness that was unnoticeable under his clothes and very streamlined but still sturdy enough to support his weight. Paragon’s top-speed was theoretically limitless but often he found he could only manage to fly slightly faster than the speed of sound due to numerous factors not least of which was the fact that the human body despite its many evolutionary gifts wasn’t a particularly aerodynamic vessel.

Flying was an enormous strain for Paragon as it entailed mentally guiding his person through the air and unlike breathing it wasn’t an automatic function. When he first began to understand his powers during his mid teen years he could only do a limited set of things: he could manipulate metal, he had a slight attunement to electromagnetic forces, and he could hover in place so long as he was wearing something metallic. As his powers and his control over them increased with time he learned to create EM shields and even high speed flight. Only in the last decade had his skill reached the point where he could actively control other phenomena, such as visible light and radio waves to produce amazing effects such as holograms. At one point he thought to combine his holography with his EM force shields to create what some might clumsily call “hard-light constructs”. Though his skill had improved flying wasn’t that much easier now than it had been when he first started and flying at night was especially hard. His fatigue was dangerous at such a time, in fact he had almost fallen asleep over Western Kansas but had woken up just in time to avoid falling on his face on a stone chimney, his face was literally one inch from the stone when he regained lucidity. But he pushed through his exhaustion and when he crossed over the invisible boundary separating Missouri and Illinois he immediately felt relieved knowing the journey was mostly over. It had been weeks since he had been in his home state and it had begun to take its toll on him. He hadn’t been born in Illinois but he had lived there for the last fifteen years and he had shed sweat and blood defending it. At the moment all he wanted was to get home and sleep in his own bed, his bed in Chicago. He owned a moderately sized apartment a small distance from the lake-front which was by no means grand but was still comfortable and in Paragon’s view cozy.

He entered the apartment through the window, hoping that no one saw him entering. Paragon was too tired to go through the proper entrance and even if someone had seen him it would take a mild case of apophenia for a person to immediately conclude that he was Paragon in civilian disguise. Almost as soon as he entered he noticed something was amiss, something didn’t feel right. His foot got caught on something, and he nearly tripped because of it. From what his tired eyes could make out it was some sort of article of clothing, and not his. He scanned the room nervously, peering through the dim, still room for the reason for his unease.
“Welcome home,” the sound made him jump out of his shoes. Paragon quickly flipped on the light switch, bathing the small room in a dim, yellow glow and he saw Jade Empress, lying on his bed in a supine position, wearing light-pink lace lingerie. She was dripping with sensual energy and had her sights set on Paragon. Paragon gazed down at his feet and saw what it was he had almost tripped on, Jade Empress’s red cheongsam dress.
“…How…did you?” Paragon stuttered, trying to find a balance between his immense fatigue, his puzzlement, and his arousal.
“I’m a much faster flyer than you are,” She giggled at Paragon’s awkward expression and removed her hair-sticks one at a time, smiling and staring at Paragon the entire time. Her hair cascaded down to her shoulders and bounced brilliantly, every ebony strand reflecting the light that shone on them.
“Did you break in?” Paragon asked nervously.
“Breaking-in would imply a forced entry; you left your door unlocked silly. It’s a good thing there’s nothing of real value here or else someone may have stolen something.” She flicked one of the sticks at Paragon, forgetting for a moment how strong she was. Luckily for both of them, despite his weariness Paragon still had excellent reflexes and narrowly dodged the stick as it passed through the space his head had occupied and embedded itself several inches into the drywall, sending small flecks of sheetrock dust everywhere.
“Are you drunk?” Paragon asked, trying his best to ignore the fact that she almost killed him, “Because you nearly decorated my wall with brains.”
“Why do I have to be drunk, Ted?” Jade Empress arched her back and spread her arms out, giving Paragon a better view of her body, “Is it that you think a woman would only be on your bed if she was drunk? You don’t have a very high opinion of yourself do you?” She giggled and shook her hair flirtatiously, the shadows of the dim flicking lights playing on the curves of her body and creating erotic shadows.
“No, I think you’re drunk because you almost killed me and you’re giggling like someone who just had twenty Mojitos then flew erratically across seven states, broke into someone’s apartment, got undressed, and then almost killed someone with a hair-stick.” Paragon replied in a tone that wasn’t quite angry, just annoyed and perturbed.
“I only had twelve Mojitos,” replied Jade Empress, “Now are you going to do something or do I have to do all the work here?” She gestured for Paragon to come join her in the bed. To be fair her superhuman metabolism allowed her to consume much more alcohol than her body size would have let on, but twelve Mojitos was more than enough to make her drunk.

“Look I appreciate the offer but I’m really tired, and I’m worried that with the amount of self control you’ve demonstrated thus far I’ll be ripped to shreds.” Paragon began to back away slowly, the way a man backs away from a rabid dog. A large part of him wanted to jump in bed with her but he didn’t like the idea of taking advantage of a drunken woman, nor did he like the idea of having his arms torn off and his pelvis crushed into powder.
“I promise I won’t kill you,” Jade Empress sat up and reissued her invitation by beckoning with her lithe index finger. When he didn’t make a movement she got tired of waiting and stood up from the bed, a fierce determined look now emblazoned on her face. Paragon sensed danger in her posture and put his hands up in protest.
“Now hold on…” Paragon began speaking but to no avail. He was quickly silenced by Jade Empress “speed-blitzing” (as heroes call it when someone with super-speed rushes someone else) him and seizing him by the shirt.
“I guess I have to get you started.” Jade Empress ripped open Paragon’s shirt and before the latter could protest and then threw him onto his bed. “Think of this as a way of establishing a better relationship between our two nations,” Jade Empress began to unhook her bra, “Show me some good old-fashioned American diplomacy, Ted.”
“Well if you won’t take no for an answer…” Paragon knew the hopelessness of the situation, he could escape from her and if he tried fighting her off it would get ugly. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to, he was just afraid of what might happen, what could happen to the apartment. Paragon began to remove his pants, fumbling on the belt due to his weariness and the stress of being thrown so hard onto the bed, “I just hope the neighbors won’t wake up.” Jade Empress started to approach slowly, climbing atop the bed and crawling toward him like a prowling jungle cat.
“I’ll be gentle, honest.” She smiled and batted her eyelashes sultrily. Paragon wanted to believe her but he knew that gentle wasn’t the way she liked it. Paragon’s nostrils flared up with her scent as she climbed on top of his weary body. She smelled odd, a combination of the sweet smell of fine perfume and the terrible smell of sweat and alcohol.
“I’m still putting my shields up,” Paragon replied.

An Excerpt from the 1987 NATO report on superhuman assets and populations: courtesy of expert Sir John Talbot.

“It is indeed a curious thing to ponder, the origin and nature of these ‘superhumans’ and the impact they have had on the world much research has been done since the discovery of the first superhuman in 1944 and yet science is no closer to understanding the how and why of superhumanity than it is to understanding if there is a life after death. It is difficult to define what a superhuman is, though at first glance it may seem simple. The most accepted definition of a superhuman is any person born human but exhibiting certain abilities that defy rational scientific thought. Not all superhumans however are immediately noticeable. Many of them, in fact most of them are easy to overlook either because their powers, such that they are, can scarcely be called useful, or because they hide them from the rest of the world. This underground segment makes it incredibly difficult to even begin to measure the true numbers of the superhuman population. As for the origins of the superhuman phenomena, many theories have been put forward by many different scientific minds. Some of these theories are completely absurd and unfounded while some are quite astute and make excellent observations. None however have truly answered the question: where did they come from? The majority of superhumans first develop their powers sometime between adolescence and early adult-hood. Exactly when the first superhumans appeared is difficult to ascertain, the first confirmed superhuman appeared in 1944 but there is reason to believe that they have existed for far longer. The majority of catalogued superhumans fall into four different camps. The first and most famous camp is that of the ‘super-hero’. These people tend to wear brightly coloured costumes and follow the whims of the governments they serve as incredibly high profile law enforcement agents. They are at times derided as ‘media-darlings’ particularly in developed nations with significant gaps in opinion between the upper echelons and the lower echelons of society. The most famous of super-heroes is of course without question Mister Magnificent, also the first superhuman and without a doubt the most powerful by a wide margin. The second camp consists of vigilantes; the most famous example of this group is the superhuman of Los Angeles known as Avenger though there is a standing invitation for her to join the US super-team: Deterrence. Were she to accept she would be immediately placed into the first category. Vigilantes are characterized by less concern for the law and less concern for their public image. Despite this some vigilantes become more popular than some super-heroes, particularly in the younger generations who feel a certain cynicism towards the self-less attitudes of the ‘media-darlings’. Governments tend to tolerate vigilantes provided they respect the most important laws and don’t interfere in the actions of official law enforcement. The third camp consists of those labeled as opportunists and profiteers, those who use their powers for profit and economic advancement. The most famous of these is the shape-shifting super-woman known simply as Intrigue. She put her powers to use as a pornographic actress, often playing multiple roles in the same film and not always of a single sex. The opportunists are not always on the right side of the law and are never in high repute, especially since their powers tend to threaten the economic status and relevance of ‘normals’. The fourth camp is of course that most odious of superhumans, the ‘super-criminals’ or alternatively ‘super-terrorists’. They are further sub-divided into two subgroups. First there are those who are simply criminals with special powers, they are often out for material gain. Then are those who do what they do for pleasure. These people are often criminally insane and unhinged to a horrific degree. Different nations have different methods for dealing with their super-criminals. One particularly interesting case is China which has solved its problem by hunting them down mercilessly and offering them a simple choice: death or service in their superhuman force, the PSF. It’s fascinating to know how many of them choose death. Also of note is a separate class of superhumans, not a social class of superhuman, rather a separate breed. This separate breed of superhuman is known as the ‘Immortals’ because of their intense longevity and greatly retarded aging. A distinctive feature of an Immortal is their hair; an Immortal’s hair will at some point in their life (usually at an abnormally young age) turn stark white and become resilient to degradation. There is a noted correlation that between being an Immortal and being among the upper strata of the superhuman pecking order, so to speak. A quick glance at the list of the top five most powerful superhumans (a list compiled by the U.N.) will demonstrate this. Mister Magnificent and his erstwhile WW-II foe Iron Cross (formerly known by the now obviously offensive name Swastika) are numbers 1 and 3 on the list respectively, both are Immortals though Iron Cross is known to dye his hair dark black to hide this.”

This is an amazing tale, I am absolutely absorbed by it!!! The writing is amazing and not at all long winded. The descriptions of the charators are quite good and the names are very inventive. Personally I find giving names to charators a difficult task. You have allowed the plot of the story to go along quite well, and it told in an intriguing fashion. I would really like to see the end result of this! It is truely wonderful!

Here's chapters 7+8

Chapter 7: Los Angeles.

Ten men entered a Los Angeles bank at approximately 9:20 AM with the intent of robbing it for all it was worth. As is always the case with poorly planned heists the operation took too long and before the vault was even opened by the frightened tellers a full row of police cruisers had parked outside of the bank and were awaiting the robbers’ next move. These robbers were desperate men with half-baked plans and half-cocked weapons. They wore masks to hide their faces, completely unaware of the fact that with the latest security camera technology a panty-hose mask offers no more protection from identification than a pair of eye-glasses would. Their greatest blunder of all was failing to understand the basic set-up of the modern banking system. That is they didn’t realize that most transactions were done electronically and the actual reserves the banks held were paltry compared to the numbers they dealt with on a daily basis. Still to say that these criminals prepared for nothing would be unfair: they did bring a small explosive in case they needed to take hostages and keep the police at bay. Unfortunately they had not brought the means to communicate this information to the police and when the police attempted to send in a negotiator one of the more excitable robbers shot at him nipping any chance for communication between the two parties in the bud. Now all that remained in the way of communication was the police shouting at them robbers through a mega-phone.

After some time the police started worrying that they would have to storm the bank, such a scenario would be dangerous for everyone involved and would surely lead to some deaths. Just as the police were radioing their Headquarters one of the police noticed something on the roof top, a dark and ominous shape accompanied by what appeared to be a young woman with blonde hair, running and jumping over the gap between buildings and landing on the roof of the bank. One of the older policemen chuckled, in his words the Calvary had arrived. Inside of the bank one of the robbers was making threats to the huddled hostages at his feet, waving his gun around and looking to see if any of them were looking at him or making any threatening movements. Suddenly and violently his posturing was shut down as from above what appeared to be an undulating mass of darkness roughly the shape of a person swooped down on him.
“Holy shit!” shouted one of the robbers, “It’s the Goddamn Avenger!” Avenger sighed, is that what they were calling her now? The criminals looked in terror at the mass of living darkness that absorbed the light and darkened the room simply by virtue of its presence. They leveled their guns at her only to have their weapons explode like so many firecrackers in their hands. Then things got dark, really dark. They wished they hadn’t robbed the bank.

“Nice job with the guns,” Avenger said with a grin.
“Oh no problem” began Bombshell, “Look out behind you.” Avenger glanced behind her and saw a criminal who despite being temporarily stunned by his gun blowing up in his hand had recovered and was trying to take Avenger down. He wasn’t a very bright criminal.
“I see him.” Avenger knocked aside the charging criminal with a deft backhand slap, sending him flying several feet backward and crashing into a bank table. Sometimes she forgot how strong she could get when she absorbed enough light.
“I just wish that I had a power that wasn’t so… destructive,” Bombshell said while immobilizing one of the robbers with a combination of nerve strikes to his neck and chest. Avenger had instructed her in the finer points of hand to hand combat seeing as she couldn’t exactly use her powers to subdue enemies without severely injuring or killing them.
“And I wish I could fly,” Avenger replied, picking up one of the robbers by the leg and swinging him into one of the other thugs incapacitating both men, “But we can’t all be flying tanks like Mister Magnificent.”
“I suppose it could be worse,” Bombshell admitted while dodging wild slashes from a robber’s knife. She grabbed the robber’s wrist and slammed it on counter, if he had just let go of the knife he wouldn’t have had a broken wrist, “Do you remember when I first started out, how useless I was?” Avenger laughed.
“Yeah sure I do, I remember saving you from that crazy weirdo Torchwood,” Avenger said, “He was really keen on killing you wasn’t he?” Avenger saw a tooth fly from one of the robbers’ faces. “I suppose I’d want to kill you too if you detonated my reproductive equipment like a pack of M-80’s. Lucky for you I was there to knock him shitless.” Avenger laughed raucously, she had a sick sense of humor and often didn’t fit in well with the others, but she often thought of herself as a sort of big sister to Bombshell, even though the latter thought of her as something of a well-intentioned lunatic.
“He was about to rape me.” Bombshell answered not seeing how it was anything to laugh at. What she had done was self defense, she couldn’t do anything else.
“I know, still funny,” Avenger replied with a chuckle. “So do you still have that crush on Paragon?”
“What? That was a long time ago,” Bombshell replied, all the while dodging punches from one of the robbers. “Why the hell are there still people like this?” She asked looking at the robbers.

“What you mean common crooks?” Avenger asked, “They’ll always exist in some form or another, no matter how powerful the deterrent crime will always survive, even thrive. The only way to completely eliminate common crime would be to control every aspect of society, which aside from being impossible is kind of opposed to the spirit of our stated mission.”
“I guess, it just seems sort of sad that because we’re here fighting these losers somewhere else someone needs our help, and he isn’t going to get our help because we had to deal with some street thugs.” Bombshell incapacitated the robber she was fighting by slamming his head into the wall, causing a small but noticeable depression in the drywall. Then there was only one robber left, he stood in the corner with a hostage, a young woman around Bombshell’s age. He was waving his knife, waving it wildly in an attempt to stave off the two heroines.
“I’ll handle this kid,” Avenger said to Bombshell. Avenger was calm; she walked toward the nervous and desperate man with a slow patient stride. “How old are you, kid?” Avenger asked the robber. The robber said nothing; he only stared and held his knife at the woman’s throat. “Okay from your silence I’m going to assume you’re old enough to choose which way you want it.” Avenger said.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” The man demanded. Scared and confused more than anything else.
“Simple, you choose if you want me to shove that knife down your throat or up your ass. Of course you can always just put it down like a nice little boy.” The man was shaking and every step that Avenger took made his tremors worse until finally he dropped the knife, released the hostage, and began to cry hysterically. “Oh Jesus, don’t cry!” Avenger said, rather disgusted to see a man bawling like a little baby, “Look,” Avenger said, “The more you cry the worse a time you’ll have in prison, believe me.” But the man kept crying. Avenger felt bad for him, his cohorts would never let him forget this.

Chapter 8: North Atlantic Ocean.

The Cruise-ship Virtue shuddered as the weight of its two split halves pulled apart from one another. The eerie sound of steel bending and being tested could be heard throughout the ship, through all of its pathways and rooms. The English hero Knight was the first on the scene. He started by using his great strength to attempt to hold up one end of the ship and push it back together with the other end. Knight grunted and groaned as he struggled with the gargantuan mass of steel feeling as though any moment his strength would give in and he would collapse with the ship on top of him. But then he experienced the strange sensation of the ship becoming lighter and his workload diminishing greatly. He looked up and was overjoyed to see Paragon, his cape fluttering in the harsh Atlantic wind, coming to his and the ship’s rescue. Paragon was carefully manipulating the two ship halves, pushing them together slowly and delicately like two odd shaped pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Only these puzzle pieces were laden with thousands of people and could fall apart at any moment.
“Well this area isn’t in your jurisdiction,” began Knight jokingly, “But in light of the situation I suppose I can accept American help.” Technically the ship had left the European Zone of Jurisdiction and was in fact in neutral waters, but Knight didn’t know that and Paragon didn’t care.

“America saves the day again, eh?” Paragon replied sarcastically.
“So what do you intend to do with this ship?” Knight asked him, “Hold it together while it completes its voyage to New York?”
“Actually I was hoping for someone else to stick the pieces back together.” Paragon replied.
“Like who?” Knight asked sarcastically, his peripheral vision catching sight of the approaching hero Iron Cross.
“I’m here to help!” Iron Cross said in heavily accented English. Iron Cross was one of the oldest recorded superhumans at around eighty-four years old but like Mister Magnificent he appeared to be a man in his early to mid-thirties. His powers were similar to the aforementioned American hero, albeit at a smaller level. Some would often refer to him derisively as a “German Mister Magnificent-Lite”. He started to use the time honored “super-welding” trick, using his energy projection powers to actually weld together the hull of the ship. It was only a temporary fix, as all the heroes knew, but it would do for the time being until the ship could reach a safe port. Iron Cross was a large man, a man whose looks were ‘classically handsome’. His costume was comprised of black, white, and silver with his namesake symbol emblazoned on his chest and decorating his collar, his cape, his belt buckle, and the cuffs of his sleeves.

“I do hope that someone aboard the ship radioed for assistance, of the aquatic civilian persuasion,” said Knight, “I don’t feel keen on babysitting this limping hulk across the whole damn Atlantic.”
“You don’t have to worry about that,” said Iron Cross with a smile, “Paragon can you give me a little boost here?” Paragon knew from experience exactly what the older hero meant; he wanted Paragon to lift the ship slightly. Paragon did so, raising the ship from the ocean’s surface. The ship almost seemed to sweat, as water trickled down and cascaded in flows from the ship’s underside. Now that it was in the air it was an easy task for Iron Cross to carry the vessel on his shoulders like if it were a canoe. Like all flying heroes Iron Cross found it a considerably lesser strain to carry something while flying than when on the ground. Why? No one really knew why, though there were some interesting theories put forward (of varying likelihood).
“Well off he goes,” Knight said, proud of what had been accomplished, “But one thing is bothering me, Paragon.”
“Oh?”

“Why didn’t Mister Magnificent show up, I mean next to airplanes Cruise Ships are pretty much his favorite things to save from horrible peril.”
“I don’t know, he’s been having trouble lately,” Paragon admitted.
“Trouble… trouble?” Knight was concerned by the very idea of Mister Magnificent having any difficulties, “What sort of trouble?”
“I’m not sure, neither is he, but it isn’t good. I’ve always felt safer knowing that he was out there, that no matter what threat came our way he would always be there to save the day. But what will save us from him?”
“It’s not that bad is it?” Knight asked worriedly.
“Let’s hope not,” Paragon replied.

That was great!! But I have a question, is Iron Cross an ex-criminal? Or was that some one else? At any rate, this is a really interesting book so far, I really like it! How long have you been writing it? Its great! It is so creative, and you explane each hero's power really well. It makes alot of sence and its easy to follow. I also like how at the beginning of each chapter, to give out the location so the reader doesn't have to guess at where it is.

Well when Iron Cross was a young man during the Second World War he was technically a member of the Nazi party. But he wasn't really a Nazi at heart, he was too young to understand.
As to how long I've been writing it I'm proud to say that I wrote the whole thing in the space of two months and edited it last month while I was in France.

Here's chapter 10-12:
Chapter 10: “The Tomb”.
The worst of the worst were sent to places with ominous names. Russia had its “Gulag”, Saudi Arabia had “the Pit”, and America had “the Tomb”. If you were a super-criminal and you got captured you were never sent to normal prison, you were instead sent to a prison far underground with all sorts of countermeasures to prevent you from using your powers. These prisons had massive guard to inmate ratios. Whereas a normal prison may have one guard to every five inmates these prisons could boast thirty guards to a single inmate. And the guards weren’t simply swinging Billy clubs; they were armed with cutting edge equipment to deal with superhuman threats and had the special training to use their state of the art weapons. The guards were well-versed in all the various protocols for dealing with special occurrences, for instance if an inmate’s lawyer wanted to pay an unscheduled visit the guards were to turn the lawyer away under “threat of violent retribution” if necessary. In fact the guards’ motto was a simple and telling maxim: “we don’t fuck around”. And in truth they couldn’t afford to be lenient considering who they were guarding. Near the bottom of the winding prison was the small chamber that housed three “cells” (little more than cages) wherein the three worst super-criminals to ever be arrested on American soil were housed. Closest to the door was the most dangerous of them all, Diablo. Diablo was originally named Demon because of his insanity and his cannibalistic tendencies but when the people who named him realized that there was another (and much more dangerous) person known by that name they quickly changed his name to Diablo, noting that he was believed to have come from south of the border. Diablo was a Beta-threat whose primary powers were super-strength and insanely quick reflexes that made him difficult to kill. He was constantly sedated by his jailers and was on death row for the last five years. Next to him was Raijin a Japanese super-terrorist awaiting extradition, his power was electrical manipulation.

Like Diablo, Raijin was constantly sedated and though his dosage was only a small fraction of what Diablo was given on a daily basis it was still more than enough to knock a large healthy man unconscious. After Raijin there was a massive empty cage reserved for the monstrous Demon. The guards doubted he would ever be captured and in truth hoped that they wouldn’t be the ones to watch over him if he was. The bars of the cage were strong but Demon had toppled skyscrapers with an errant slap of his clawed hand and most likely thought of steel I-beams as nutritious mid-morning snacks. And they knew that no hand-held weapon yet devised by man could do more than tickle the monster. Perhaps the one positive effect of Demon being a prisoner there would be the added deterrent against rioting. After all, if a rioting prisoner were to let him loose then everyone would be sorry: prisoners, guards, everyone. But that was all hypothetical. The next and final “cell” in the room belonged to one Miss Catherine Seeger, better known by her criminal alias as Briquette. Briquette and her twin brother Torchwood were an odd case in that both of them developed the same exact powers as one another. There had been other cases where super-twins had been born and later both possessed powers but always there was a difference in what powers they developed. In this case however both Catherine and her brother Michael developed “tactile pyro-kinesis” meaning that she could burn anything that she touched provided the object could be burnt. For a long time Briquette had been one of the cruelest and reviled criminals in the world, etched out in that regard only by her brother Torchwood and a handful of others. Torchwood was the more unstable and unhinged of the pair. He had such little concern that he would hold onto objects and people as they burned, not even flinching as the flames climbed up his own body and consumed his flesh. He had worn bandages over his entire body to cover the burns, removing them whenever he wanted to truly terrify people with the sight of his charred body.

Together they had menaced many heroes but none had brought them more joy to torment than Mister Magnificent. Briquette discovered something about the hero in one particularly memorable encounter; she discovered that he was just as human as everyone else. It began as mock flirting in the course of fighting him but soon it expanded as Briquette genuinely tried to seduce the Man of Might. And to her surprise it worked, well it almost worked. Mister Magnificent had flown her up above the clouds to consummate the liaison and as his hand slid up her trembling leg she had felt the cold sensation of hand-cuffs being clamped on her wrists. He then did something, perhaps a nerve strike, to knock her unconscious. It was the hardest arrest he ever made. The next thing Briquette remembered was being taunted by the guards outside of her cage. As years passed her anger turned to sadness and her sadness turned to remorse, remorse for her actions. She knew she would be imprisoned for the rest of her days but then what else was there for her? She could never be accepted into a society that knew of her only as Briquette the arsonist and murderer. And then there came the day when Mister Magnificent broke into the prison, for no apparent reason other than pure passing whim. The protocols had said nothing on the subject of super-heroes breaking in though the commander of the guards was quick to inform his men that there were some implied provisions such as shooting at anyone who broke in (and that meant anyone).
“Shoot Mister Magnificent?” One of the younger guards asked.

“Shut up kid, he’ll hear you!” An older guard snubbed the young one. The guards and inmates were both petrified at the silent and relaxed but eerily off-beat hero who strode through the halls. There was intensity in his expression that silenced the prisoners and put the fear of God into them. The words “…come to finish the job…” were whispered between cells, as were the words “please God, don’t let him…”, but overall the most commonly whispered words were “Oh shit.” He passed by all the prisoners and guards and as he walked by sighs of relief followed. He stopped at the last cell at the bottom of the prison, the cell containing Briquette. Briquette rubbed her eyes with her hands and feared she had gone insane; there was no way he was here, no way. But he was there, big as life, even bigger. Without any more trouble than it would take to crush an ant Mister Magnificent ripped the steel cage open.
“Miss me?” he asked. He had a smile that was out of character, a sick smile suggestive of being mentally unhinged. He had missed her; her fiery touch was the only touch that his invulnerable skin could truly feel.

“… … …” Briquette could only mumble mutely and sit there. The cage was open but she had no desire to escape and though she knew there wasn’t much for her to look forward to in life she still wasn’t keen on dying. At first death was indeed what Briquette thought Mister Magnificent had in store for her. But it was not so. Gently he took her hand, urging her silently to stand up. Her legs had atrophied and were weak. They wobbled at first but with Mister Magnificent’s help she managed to stand. “What are you…?” Briquette tried to force out some words but before she could finish the question Mister Magnificent silenced her with a kiss. She hadn’t expected this. She felt his right hand alighting on the small of her back while his other hand settled on her left breast. He was gentle but insistent and Briquette felt compelled to wrap her arms around his neck. Then there was the sound of a pistol being cocked. Mister Magnificent gently pulled Briquette to his side and faced the man who had worked up the courage to stand against him. It was a pistol Vs a man with incalculable speed, strength, and durability. No doubt it was one of the most one sided stand-offs in history.
“Can I help you officer?” He asked mockingly.
“I’m going to have to ask you to…,” the guard gulped, “…leave.” Mister Magnificent didn’t even twitch.
“Oh, I’ll leave,” the hero answered, “But I’ll have to ask you to inform your commander that I’m transferring this prisoner.” He tenderly stroked Briquette’s cheek.

“Transfer? Transfer to where?” The guard asked, feeling more and more in-over-his-head by the second.
“My place or her place, haven’t decided yet.” He coupled his response with an uncharacteristic smirk. “You ready to go?” He turned to Briquette. The temptation had begun to seize her, the thought of being free again, but then her guilt and shame caught up with her.
“Please, I don’t want to go,” by saying this she shocked everyone present including herself, “I’m not the same person anymore, I…” Mister Magnificent tugged away bitterly, disappointed and disgusted at her. In tugging away he left her unbalanced and she fell to the ground, her legs too weak to stand on their own. Mister Magnificent looked as if he were about to lose his temper, his arrogant smirk replaced with a surly scowl. He wheeled around to face the guard once more and with a flash of light from his hand incinerated the guard’s weapon. Molten metal poured down, burning the guard’s hands and sizzling on the floor below. The guard shrieked in pain and horror before collapsing due to a combination of pain and shock. Mister Magnificent then turned to Briquette, who had crawled back into her open cage.
“Have fun rotting here,” Mister Magnificent said bitterly, “I’m off to find someone worth talking to.” Not a single guard attempted to accost him as he walked past them. They weren’t paid enough for this job.

An excerpt from Sir John Talbot’s 1992 interview with Paragon:

“Sir John Talbot: I think sir, you are dancing around the question.
Paragon: And which question is that, which question am I dancing around? You just asked a slew of questions without giving me any time to answer them.
SJT: No need to get defensive. What I believe you aren’t willing to answer is this: why do you hide your face? Are you afraid of something or someone?
PAR: I don’t think I need to explain the concept of anonymity to you; you’re the world’s foremost researcher in the field of superheroes.
SJT: Superhumans, I am the foremost researcher in the field of superhumans, superheroes like you are but a segment of my research. And furthermore I understand the reason why someone might wear a mask, what I don’t know is why you personally feel the need to don a disguise. Is there something or someone you’re trying to protect? You’ve been active for more than twenty years and you’ve shown no signs of aging, surely that means that the old ‘protecting your loved ones’ routine isn’t the motivating factor, I mean your parents are probably dead by now and you can’t really manage a long term public identity because of the age factor. So I suppose what I’m asking is how different your life would be if your identity was public knowledge. Wouldn’t you like to finally be publicly recognized for your heroics by name and not just by way of a government serial number and a monthly paycheck?
PAR: I didn’t become a hero so that I could have streets named after me or have parades in my honor; I became a hero to help people.
SJT: How noble of you, I’m sure all the other heroes you work with feel exactly the same way.
PAR: If you’re referring to Mister Magnificent, don’t you dare try to imply that he’s ever done any of it for any reason other than because it was the right thing to do. He’s been doing his job since before you were born, kid.
SJT: On the subject of Mister Magnificent—I’ll ignore you calling me ‘kid’— he’s never worn a mask or cowl or helmet of any kind and his identity is known to everyone as Derrick Nielsen.
PAR: Well, do you really think a public identity makes a hero any more relatable? Do you think it says anything about who the hero is on the inside? I’m sure you remember the super-criminal Manticore.
SJT: Of course.
PAR: Well then I’m sure you’re also aware that his civilian identity was Jeff Hansen, millionaire philanthropist and humanitarian, the nicest guy you could meet. But as soon as he put on the costume and became Manticore he had a tendency to plant explosives in the very same hospitals he had donated to, and use his venom to kill some of those little orphans he had put up in his shelters. Jeff Hansen may have even been a real person with his own desires and beliefs but as soon as that costume came on Jeff vanished and Manticore stepped out of the shadows, ready for murder and mayhem. You may even say that at Manticore he strived to undo the work of his alter ego, as if he was in conflict with him.
SJT: You’re suggesting that costumed superhumans become their own masks?
PAR: Mister Magnificent is Mister Magnificent just like I’m Paragon. I have a birth name and a birth certificate somewhere but the name doesn’t define who I am any more than my eye color does. The helmet that you’re staring at is more important than the face behind it. Besides, if I took it off would you really recognize me? I do have a public identity, and as you astutely pointed out it’s not my first, but I assure you my public identity is a nobody who if exposed as Paragon would disappear and resurface with another job and another name in another city.
SJT: So you aren’t hiding then?
PAR: What do I have to hide from? The danger is the same either way. The only difference being that if my enemies find out my public identity then my residence would become one more battleground.
SJT: Do you mean to tell me that you aren’t afraid that one day an enemy might find out who your civilian persona is, sneak into your flat and cut your throat?
PAR: Well I think the odds of anyone being dumb enough to try to off me with a ferrous weapon like a knife are pretty low.
SJT: That isn’t my point. My point is that they could take you by surprise.
PAR: Well as I said before the danger is always there that I’ll get killed one way or another. One day I might be flying through the city and a few miles off some hired gun may get me with a long range Sniper Rifle. It’s a dangerous job whether you have an identity to protect or not.
SJT: That’s all well and good but since we’ve already broached the ‘you don’t have loved-ones’ issue I feel I must remind you that it isn’t the case with everyone.
PAR: Most super-criminals and super-terrorists are bat-shit crazy but that doesn’t mean they’re stupid. Can you imagine if Mister Magnificent went over the edge because someone killed his loved ones?
SJT: I’m fairly certain his family is mostly dead. I mean he has a few distant relatives in nursing homes but…
PAR: Just humor me. I’m asking if you can imagine Mister Magnificent losing someone he cared about and then going over the edge. There would be no force on this earth that could save the idiotic villain who killed his loved one. Nothing could stop him, and the law, well just say that the law frequently encourages us to use lethal force on the more powerful and dangerous criminals. A super-criminal knows his bounds, there aren’t a lot of them, but one of them is to never force the hero to stoop to their level. Because all too frequently they find that the only reason they weren’t immediately turned into a smear on the wall in their first encounter was that the hero had just one iota of decency. Take that decency away from a superhero and all you have is a super-weapon.”

Chapter 11: Arctic Circle.

The Polar-Man loved machines more than he loved people, machines didn’t complain. Machines could be melded and reshaped to exact specifications without unanticipated developments like mutations or death. Machines were also logical in their performance whereas living beings (people in particular) were chaotic and unreliable. The Polar-Man was motivated to create great inventions and innovations for three primary reasons: pleasure, profit, and revenge. Revenge was the motivation that produced the most dangerous and fantastic inventions. In fact making the Polar-Man hate you was a sure-fire way of motivating him to revolutionize some branch of science or technology. He was currently working on a weapon that would obliterate Mister Magnificent to avenge his lost eye. According to the Polar-Man’s warped sense of justice an eye for an eye meant that losing one eye warranted murdering the person responsible. The new eye had come along nicely; he was able to see past clothing and skin to see his circulatory system and his skeletal structure, more still he could actually see electric currents as if they were streams of dyed water passing through the circuits of his laboratory. What most people didn’t realize was that the Polar-Man’s ability to fly was self-endowed.

He invented a device that utilized gravitic and inertial manipulation to propel him through the sky at enormous speeds that only the fastest aircraft and superhumans could top: Mach 2.9. He loved building things because he liked to do things he was good at and he was very good at building. In only a few days he had created a weapon that could in theory disassemble Mister Magnificent atom by atom. It all hinged on whether or not Mister Magnificent’s molecular structure was still a normal molecular structure despite its impossible durability and resistance to deformation. The Polar-Man worked with the most advanced and precise tools though he had also done some amazing things with simple hand tools and candle-light, such as when he built an artificial lung for an ally in the Saudi Arabian desert with nothing more than a makeshift soldering iron, some recycled circuits from a broken Laptop computer, a broken bicycle, and his own two hands. Getting said artificial lung into the person’s body was the hard part. He was wired up in his Northern Fortress with the means to monitor every corner of the globe through a complex network of micro satellites and “fly-cams”.

He had an eye in all the Halls of Power throughout the world from the White House to the Australian Parliament Building and everything in between. He also tracked every flying object larger than a European Starling across the world, sorting priorities by speed first and size second. The reason for this order was simple: some relatively small objects were incredibly important. One particular object was so important it warranted its own unique color for its blip on the massive radar screen. There was only one blue dot amid thousands of red, orange, and yellow dots. Yellow dots represented small, slow moving objects: most likely birds, bats, and large insects. Orange dots represented small aircraft and slow-flying superhumans. Red dots symbolized large aircraft and quick flying superhumans. The Polar-Man was himself a red dot. But there was only one solitary blue dot on the screen. That dot represented Mister Magnificent, not that it warranted a unique hue to be distinguished from the rest. Unless the Russians were flying one of their Foxbats or the USAF had dusted off an SR-71 there was no chance of confusing Mister Magnificent’s blip for any other. And as the Polar-Man chanced to gaze up at the screen he noticed that the blue dot was racing across the North American continent northward toward the Arctic Circle. This realization made the Polar-Man work even faster on putting the finishing touches to his device. Mister Magnificent would be knocking at the door, so to speak, in less than five minutes; at least that’s what the Polar-Man conjectured judging from his imminent guest’s velocity. The Polar-Man finished the final seal with a welding torch (a rather stop-gap measure implemented only in light of circumstances) just as the ominous sound of two eighty-ton tungsten-steel blast doors being knocked inward reached his ears. He knew he wouldn’t have much time to prepare so without ceremony the Polar-Man switched the weapon on. Far off sentry turrets firing molten iron were ripped apart and electromagnetic barriers were penetrated like old mosquito netting. The Polar-Man slid the weapon over a gauntleted left hand and got a feel for its interior. The sounds of his automated defenses being thrashed were getting closer and closer and he couldn’t be sure how much time he had left. The death-noises of broken machines making their final whirring motions filled the normally silent halls of his fortress and the barely audible din of slow footsteps became ever clearer by the second. The Polar-Man, hunched over the workstations like a primordial man hunched over an open fire, stood up straight, opened his shoulders and leveled his weapon at the door nearest to him. It was a thick steel door that with each passing second and with each muffled footstep sound looked less and less secure, and then the noise he had awaited arrived, the noise that set his heart racing and sent chills through his spine. Sweat trickled down the nape of his neck as the mighty door was knocked off its magnetic hinges by the unstoppable force of the man with the strength of a god. The halls outside of his lab were brightly lit, at least brightly lit relative to the dark lab, and as the door slammed on the floor the light flooded the lab and hurt the Polar-Man’s eyes. Framed in brilliant light, not more than four meters away from the Polar-Man, was the huge, dark, and ominous silhouette of Mister Magnificent.

The Polar-Man had to admit (to himself) that it was an impressive entrance, one that he would have loved to have made himself. But he knew he had to act swiftly so without much more thought he fired the weapon, aiming at the exact center of Mister Magnificent’s breast where his emblem was. No light or sound was produced from the weapon on firing, though he was certain it had fired as the sensors in his mechanical eye were picking up massive levels of radiation being directed in Mister Magnificent’s direction. The shape at the doorway didn’t move and for a moment the Polar-Man feared that the weapon had misfired, then there was another development. A barely visible ribbon of light, ‘squiggly’ one might call it, arced over and around Mister Magnificent’s torso then disappeared. The large man at the doorway began laughing hoarsely.
“That tickles, you know.” Mister Magnificent said. The Polar-Man couldn’t believe it, the weapon had failed. He released the control at the long-end of the weapon, allowing it to slide off from his glove and clatter to the floor uselessly. His heart pounded furiously and his feet turned cold, it was just him and Mister Magnificent now. If he was going to die, he would die with dignity he wouldn’t die on his knees and though his legs were buckling with fear he stood erect.
“So come to finish the job then?” The Polar-Man asked, nostrils flaring and lip curling indignantly into a snarl. He stared down his nemesis with clenched fists and a straightened back.
“Are you referring to your missing eye?” Mister Magnificent asked.
“As a matter of fact I am,” The Polar-Man replied, now gritting his teeth in anger. Mister Magnificent wasn’t moving from his position at the threshold of the door, all he did was stand and smile, a sickening smile that the Polar-Man had often seen on the faces of his fellow super-criminals.
“You know I never could figure you out, John. I’ve always wondered what would drive a man to exile himself to the far north to some workshop. Where do you keep the elves?”
“Really, a tacky Santa-Claus joke; is that what you came for?” The Polar-Man couldn’t believe it. He was prepared to die, being insulted in his own fortress was another thing entirely.

“I’m just saying maybe you should shave the beard and relocate to a less clichéd locale, like maybe the Himalayas.”
“That does it,” roared the Polar-Man, “Get the Hell out of my Fortress!” He made a headlong dash at Mister Magnificent, intent on wiping the smile off his face. Midway through the assault the logical side of the Polar-Man’s mind caught up with him, charging Mister Magnificent was a bad idea. Mister Magnificent made no attempt at dodging or blocking the strike, he stood as still as a rock and allowed the first blow to connect with his face. He was still smiling when the fist landed and he kept smiling as the Polar-Man pulled back a broken hand and groaned in agony. Four broken fingers and a broken wrist was all the Polar-Man had to show for his assault. Mister Magnificent caught sight of the hand mounted device that the Polar-Man had wielded, now lying on the floor like an empty and discarded bottle of liquor. He waved his hand and as if compelled by some unseen force the device began to levitate and move across the room toward Mister Magnificent.
“What do we have here?” Mister Magnificent asked whimsically. He took the device and studied it closely, the Polar-Man could only look up and grit his teeth to block out the pain and contain his anger. “Oh dear,” remarked the hero, “You didn’t do a very good job on the welding at all. You’re usually much more anal about it, what happened?” He looked down on the Polar-Man who had to utilize all his will to keep from attacking again, “Not that it would have mattered.”
“Well?” The Polar-Man growled. Mister Magnificent stopped grinning and looked down.
“Well what?”
“What are you waiting for, just do it!” The Polar-Man was beside himself with rage. He didn’t want to stand around and wait for his demise; he wanted to get it over with.

“I have no interest in killing you John, maybe I did when I flew here but then I realized that killing you won’t matter, what good will killing one little cockroach do?” He destroyed the device with a small blast of destructive energy and left the Polar-Man to brood and fume in the darkness of the lab. The Polar-Man didn’t try to stop him as he left, even though there was a voice in the back of his mind telling him: ‘don’t you dare let him go!’, and ‘what are you waiting for? Kill the bastard!’ ‘Sometimes even the greatest have to admit utter defeat’, that’s what the Polar-Man told himself. He had to tell himself something.

Chapter 12: Wisconsin.
There’s that time of year in between spring and summer, the time when the cattails grew fat and hanged lazily over the streams and lakes they adjoin. Far away from the tourist trails and even from the local inhabitants, a large man with white hair sat on a bank of sand and ate the flower spike of an immature cattail like if it were a delicious corn-on-the-cob. The flower spike could be eaten when it was green and if boiled up tasted something like corn on the cob but the man for some reason chose to eat it raw. One hiker who had strayed off the beaten path had caught a glimpse of the man and thought he bore a close resemblance to Mister Magnificent with the white hair and the impressive physique. The hiker left without approaching the man, fearing he was an escaped convict, after all prisoners tend to have odd hairstyles and well-developed physiques from all the weight-lifting. That’s what prisoners did right? Mister Magnificent had heard the man’s approach from several miles away. It was easy to pick out the sound of footsteps from the natural sounds of the water, the wind, the trees, and the birds. He didn’t acknowledge the man’s presence however, simply hoping the man would go away. It was hard for him to remember what it was like just being Derrick Nielsen. Just being a simple boy from Wisconsin. He was born in 1919 as the fourth son of a Swedish immigrant carpenter and his German-Polish wife. He grew up in the 1930’s and lived a normal life for his entire childhood and his teen years. Then he turned twenty-two and he noticed something peculiar, his hair was turning white like an old man’s. Then Pearl Harbor happened and America joined the War. Derrick like most young men at the time wanted to enlist.

All three of his brothers enlisted and shipped off by the end of 1942, Fred first, then Rolf, and then Peter. But not Derrick, his father was adamant about keeping one son safe from harm, as he reasoned Derrick’s mother couldn’t possibly handle having to worry about all four sons at once. And so two years passed and as Derrick’s hair turned whiter and whiter his brothers died one by one. Fred died storming the beaches of Morocco during Operation Torch in November of 1942. Peter, who had joined the Navy as a pilot on the USS Enterprise, died in January of ’43 when the landing gears of his TBD Dauntless malfunctioned on a routine landing. Rolf had become a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne and was dropped over Gela in Sicily. He was hit by a sharpshooter before he even landed. Then by the time the summer came around and the news had reached home that all his brothers had died Derrick decided that no matter what his parents thought he was going to enlist. After receiving basic training Derrick joined the 2nd Armored Division and saw some action in France during the aftermath of D-Day. It was at the Battle of the Falaise Gap that his life changed forever. The Sherman he was in was hit by an 88mm shell in its weak spot, not that it would have made any difference at such a close range and with such a powerful artillery shell. The tank was split in half, Derrick thought he was going to die, but he soon realized that he wasn’t hurt and he felt no pain. He watched in awe as the flames crept up the sleeve of his uniform but didn’t burn his skin. The next thing he remembered was pulling the driver and gunner out of the tank. He remembered how they felt as light as a feather, he didn’t even have to try to carry them. Then he heard the sound of another shell being loaded into the 88 as if it were less than ten feet away. He rushed the gun’s position, running faster than he had ever thought possible, he saw the faces of the enemy twist into shapes of shock and terror as they witnessed his speed. And then they fired. The shell hit him square in the chest, destroying his clothing but not even breaking his skin. He was but ten feet away from the Germans, shocked to still be alive and unharmed.

He stopped to take in what had just happened, so did the Germans. Derrick saw the glowing tip of a cigarette hit the ground, its owner having let it slip from his mouth as his jaw dropped. They were speechless and petrified with fear and shock. After regaining his composure Derrick resumed his advance but at a much slower pace. As a testament to their training the Germans were able to reload the weapon in less than ten seconds even though their hands, knees, and elbows were shaking terribly. Derrick gazed at the Gun Captain’s hand as he pulled the lanyard, it looked to Derrick like he was doing it in slow motion, everything looked slow to him. Calmly Derrick put his hand over the hot muzzle of the 88mm, made a short mental prayer and prepared for the inevitable. The barrel of the weapon exploded as the shell impacted Derrick’s indestructible hand sending scraps of metal hurtling everywhere, cutting and wounding the German gun crew but bouncing harmlessly off of Derrick’s exposed chest and face. He looked down and from the look in the Artillery Captain’s eyes; he knew that he would have no more trouble from the 88mm. As the battle raged on he smashed through hedgerows like a bowling ball through lined up crystal glasses and tore up machine gun nests like sandcastles. He didn’t know what had happened to him and why he wasn’t dead. All he knew was that there was a battle to win. In one particularly incredible incident the soldiers of both sides stopped firing for a moment, transfixed by the sight of a man stopping a moving Tiger Tank before lifting it over his head and tearing it asunder. The Tiger’s gunner suffered a heart attack while the rest of the crew simply stared blankly, unable to truly process what had just happened to their mighty vehicle. The German forces became disorganized and demoralized as a result of the news of an indestructible superman that was destroying artillery and armor. Another important moment came near of the end of 1944 when Derrick spotted a pair of BF-109’s searching for something near the border of Belgium and France.

Derrick jumped high into the air to intercept the pair, but the pilots were experienced and quick on the controls, steering out of his way. Derrick cursed as he sailed past them, wishing that he could turn around. As if by instinct he pulled in the direction of the two aircraft and to his amazement it worked, he could fly like a bird. The pilots had heard of the man and thought they could deal with him, unfortunately nothing could have prepared them for what happened next. The older and more experienced of the two pilots felt his plane lurch as if something heavy had just climbed aboard. Next thing he knew the greenhouse-glass canopy was being peeled away by a large white haired man. Derrick leaned into the cockpit, looked the pilot in the eye and said: ‘boo’. There were a few GI’s who watched him destroy the two planes. They cheered as he flew down with two pilots in tow, carrying them by their coats. They surrounded him, patting him on the back and hoisting him on their shoulders. ‘Aw come on it was nothing’ Derrick said, embarrassed at being the cynosure for one of the first times in his life. ‘Nothing?’ one of the soldiers spat some greasy black chewing tobacco, ‘Hell that was magnificent!’ He served out the rest of the war in Europe, being transferred out of the 2nd Armored to be placed into a special one man army corps. He met the man who would one day become Iron Cross for the first time on the last day of the war in Europe: December 7th, 1944. They traded blows over the Reichstag as all of Berlin watched with rapt attention. The fight ended with Derrick grabbing the inexperienced superhuman and pile driving him through the Swastika that adorned the Reichstag. Derrick then strolled into the bunker that held the German General Staff and in slow heavily-accented German demanded their surrender. His transfer to the Pacific theater was delayed by request of General Eisenhower. Eisenhower decided that it would be best if Derrick was given some rest before shipping off once more. Eisenhower was also the one to actually give Derrick his title, as he overheard a GI referring to Derrick as ‘Mister Magnificent over there’.

Eisenhower rather like the name and upon meeting Derrick decided to refer to him as such. As Mister Magnificent recalled that leave was the last vacation he ever received. He returned after several months of leave in America and was promptly given orders to escort the bomber carrying the new Atomic weapon. Mister Magnificent remembered looking on in horror as he witnessed thousands dying. What made it worse was the fact that he could hear every single scream. He blamed himself for allowing the bombing to occur. When the US dropped their second bomb over Nagasaki, the crew of the Bockscar was stunned to see Derrick catch the weapon and fly with it to the upper atmosphere. When it detonated Derrick was feared dead, but not two days later he arrived in Pearl Harbor, naked but unscathed. He was instrumental in the success of Operation Downfall, singlehandedly defeating an entire Japanese Brigade without killing a single enemy soldier. At the Surrender Ceremony Douglas MacArthur tied an American flag around Derrick’s neck, giving him his first cape. Things were simpler then. Mister Magnificent missed the days when he was the only superhuman, when right and wrong were easy to separate and when his mind was at ease. No more was that the case. Mister Magnificent wondered what a world without him would be like. Would it be worse off as he had always told himself? Or would it be the same simple world he remembered from his childhood?

Nice. Very nice.
I only skimmed it though. I simply don't have the time to stop and thoroughly read the whole story right now (maybe once class and overtime is over), but wanted to offer encouragement.

thanks

Simply captivating! That was really good. the discriptions of Mister magnificents past was vivid. The scene in the Artic Circle was good too! I really like how easily you can slip inbetween each charator and tell the events from their points of view.

When I first wrote Chapter 12 it was sorta like filler, because I was kind of stuck on where to go next and I needed something to fill in the space between scenes but it came out nicely I think.

Here's Chapter 13:

Chapter 13: “the Tomb”.

Briquette didn’t touch the steaming cup of coffee in front of her, she stared blankly and unblinkingly at it, but she didn’t touch it. Paragon wanted her to be as at ease as possible, but he knew as long as the guards were there she would be unable to relax.

“Son, would it be too much to ask for you and your friend to leave us alone?” Paragon asked the senior guard, who at the age of forty-six didn’t like being referred to as ‘son’. The guard grunted a sort of affirmation before leaving the room with his fellow guard, shutting the door behind him. Paragon gazed up at the security camera, wiping its processor with an EM pulse to ensure they would truly be alone. Still Briquette didn’t move or say a word. Despite languishing in little more than a cage for years Briquette still retained some of her beauty and Paragon knew to his own discomfort that he was being gentle with her for that reason alone. “It’s okay, Catherine, we’re alone now.” Paragon used the gentlest voice he could muster, but Briquette still said nothing. Paragon knew this called for desperate measures, so without much pause Paragon opened the locks that fastened his helmet to his armor and lifted the helmet up revealing his hair and face. Briquette had never seen his face before, indeed few people had, and this alone caused a stirring in her.

“I’m sorry.” She said at last, staring into his hazel eyes.
“Sorry about what?” Paragon asked.
“I’m sorry for all the trouble I caused, God knows how many fires you had to put out.” She seemed completely sincere and rueful in her apology.
“We aren’t here to discuss your past crimes, I just want to know what happened between you and Mister Magnificent yesterday.”
“What’s to know that you haven’t already heard from the guards?” she asked.
“Yes I heard their account,” Paragon said, “I understand that according to them you attacked a guard, burning his hand.” Briquette neither confirmed nor denied it; she merely cast her eyes down and resumed staring at the steam that rose from the coffee. Paragon continued, “Now I know that isn’t true, because if you had attacked him and were back to your old tricks he wouldn’t have a hand left to point the finger at you,” Briquette stared blankly at Paragon, “Briquette,” Paragon took her hand and squeezed it gingerly with his own, “I need to know why you aren’t speaking out, why you aren’t defending yourself.” For the first time a genuine emotion manifested in Briquette’s erstwhile inert brown eyes, she almost looked angry.

“What do you care? Does it really matter to you if I attacked him or not?” Paragon felt his hands warming up to an uncomfortable temperature; Briquette’s powers were quite literally flaring up, “You’re only here because you want to know if Mister Magnificent has gone over the edge.”
“Briquette, please.” Paragon felt his hands burning. Briquette gasped, her anger was gone and replaced once more by depression, and she pulled away from Paragon’s hands as if they were poisonous. She looked as if she were about to say sorry again but Paragon cut her off. “It’s okay; I’m fine,” He showed her his hand which was only slightly red, “See, no burns.” He smiled weakly, attempting to comfort her. Paragon was startled at the change in her personality from before her incarceration; she was quiet and somewhat imperturbable whereas before she had been a stereotypical cackling homicidal super-criminal. What had brought on this change concerned Paragon greatly. Had he finally found the Holy Grail of crime-fighting? Was she a truly repentant super-criminal or was it the product of some form of brainwashing? She was too different to be the same Briquette that he had battled before. Briquette was more than just a pyromaniac, she was a pyrophiliac.

Sometimes when Paragon had snuck up on her after she committed some crime he would catch a glimpse of her holding a burning twig or leaf, staring at the dancing flame and licking her lips. Now she seemed completely loath to the very thought of burning his hands even slightly. In a strange way Paragon preferred the way she was before, at least then she didn’t depress him. He knew why Mister Magnificent had abandoned her during his break in, he had it in his power to take her with him whether she wanted to go or not but he let her stay. Mister Magnificent had come to the prison in search of something that no longer existed, in search of a conquest he had passed up years ago and had never quite gotten over. Not finding that and instead discovering a broken husk he left in search of something else, but not before letting his anger manifest and destroying the guard’s gun.

“I supposed I got what I wished for.” Briquette said suddenly.
“What’s that?” Paragon asked, confused.
“When I was free I wanted to see Mister Magnificent lose the act, to start acting real.”
“You think it’s an act?” Paragon asked.
“Of course it is. But when I finally got to see the face of the real guy underneath the Boy Scout exterior, I was frightened by what I saw.” She feebly reached across the table finding a loose thread from Paragon’s sleeve and tugging it free. After some twitching and some visible struggling she managed to set it on fire. She gazed at the burning thread with a mixture of awe, ecstasy, fear, shame, and revulsion. “What I used to do? Multiply that by a million and then you’ll have a good idea of what I think Mister Magnificent is headed toward.”
“I don’t think you know Mister Magnificent as well as I do, he would never be so destructive.” Paragon insisted, rather unsure of the authenticity of that statement. And for the first time Briquette released a single spark of her former personality with a short bemused chuckle, a cackle almost.

“I know the man better than you think; I’ve done things with him you couldn’t, I’ve been as close to him as anyone can get.” Paragon hadn’t thought it had ever gotten that far, and was rather surprised that Mister Magnificent would ever have crossed such a line, but then he never thought he would have to talk to someone about Mister Magnificent breaking into a prison either. As he got up to leave he offered Briquette a chance to transfer to a more liberal prison. She thought about it but said no. Paragon noticed that she was livelier than when he had first entered. There was a spark in her eye once more. Then as he reached for his helmet Briquette’s hand reached out and grabbed his arm. She gave him a quick kiss, parting his lips and exploring his mouth with her tongue. Paragon felt his mouth getting hot, like if someone lit a match inside of it. He pulled away, visibly disturbed, and yet there was a part of him that wanted to do it again. ‘Jesus,’ he thought to himself, ‘No wonder Mister Magnificent did what he did.’ As for Briquette she appeared to be ashamed of herself but Paragon had to wonder how much of the old Briquette was still left in her. Broken, depressed husks don’t kiss like that.

Chapter 14: Malibu.

Dragon was even more unpleasant now than he usually was; revenge was on his mind. That was what fueled his temper. That much Avenger could tell. He had shown up over the bay, roaring out a challenge in broken English to Mister Magnificent. He wanted to get his own back, but wasn’t too particular about who he got it from. When Avenger showed up to see what was going on he attacked her. He should have been able to beat her right then and there but he was blinded by fury and unable to think his attack out. Avenger on the other hand was perhaps the most dangerous head-to-head fighter alive and was not only a master at using the environment to win, but also at using her opponent’s own weaknesses against them. The fight had taken place on a short cliff overlooking a beach and five minutes into the battle Dragon had yet to land a blow on Avenger, and she was damn glad of that fact. A single punch, even if it merely grazed her would shatter her body like a pane of glass.

“You need to calm down buddy.” Avenger spat, dodging a vicious but poorly aimed left hook. Dragon replied with a slew of curses in Mandarin and English and redoubled his efforts, furiously throwing punches at the aggravatingly agile Avenger. Dragon threw his back far too much into one punch that was supposed to take Avenger’s head off and gave his enemy an opening. Avenger noticed that Dragon had picked one foot up from the ground and had left himself vulnerable. Avenger seized the opportunity and grabbed Dragon’s arm at the elbow and the wrist. She grunted, pulling Dragon off his feet, over her shoulders and throwing him headlong into a small beach house behind her. Dragon wasn’t in the right state of mind and couldn’t react quick enough to avert collision, and as such he smacked the wooden hut face first. The hut was destroyed by the indestructible man and wood shot up in every direction. Dragon kept on moving even after destroying the hut, only stopping after plowing through a swimming-pool length tract of sand.

Avenger knew she had less than three seconds before Dragon could get up, angrier than ever and cave her skull in, so she had to try to contact someone. But who? Mister Magnificent was no longer reliable, Bombshell couldn’t fly, the Guardian was still resting hundreds of miles away from his fight with Demon, and Paragon was still busy investigating ‘the Tomb’. Her time ran out and as Dragon picked himself up from the ground and spat out sand and other unsavory things that had found their way into his mouth, Avenger found herself hoping that someone was on their way. Dragon’s next assault was brutal: a flying charge that Avenger couldn’t hope to deflect and had little chance of dodging. She counted the milliseconds, Dragon was closing in and she had to think of something. Thinking fast Avenger fell back onto the ground just as Dragon was about to hit her, she knew she had to time it right, or else she would be in a world of pain. Dragon knew he had missed her but wasn’t prepared for the feeling of a pair of leather boots crossing over his neck. Avenger put all of her strength she had into stopping Dragon midflight, working against his great momentum.

Avenger pushed off from the ground and pulled down hard with her legs, planting Dragon’s face into the sand. Avenger hoped that she never had to do that again, one of the muscles in her right leg was pulled and her knees were throbbing. When Dragon got up she knew she would be at his mercy, she just hoped that she would fade into unconsciousness before the inevitable final blow. Would Dragon really kill her? That was the question, he was certainly angry enough. But that question would never be answered. As Avenger’s eyes closed she witnessed Dragon standing over her. The last thing she saw before blacking out was a flying man in white tackling Dragon. Apparently, Avenger thought, Mister Magnificent had come through for her. But wait, Mister Magnificent didn’t have a beard.

The Polar-Man and Dragon had never matched strength against one another before and thus it was an experience for both of them. It is difficult for superhumans of their level of power to test the true limits of their strength since not many objects exist that they cannot lift or destroy. This leaves the only true test of strength: a test against another superhuman with a similar level of power. Dragon took deep breaths and attempted to expel the anger from his system, he couldn’t enter a fight with an opponent like the Polar-Man with such unbalanced emotions clouding his judgment. Finding his balance was incredibly difficult, however. The Polar-Man had Dragon in a headlock at one point and used the opportunity to whisper into Dragon’s ear a taunt in Mandarin, a taunt that included the words ‘sand’, ‘woman’, and ‘pathetic’. Dragon flew into a rage and pulled out of the lock, grabbing his opponent by the arm and tossing him into the water. The Polar-Man stopped himself before hitting the water and returned to redouble his efforts, trading blows with the Chinese Man of Steel and continuing to poke and prod at Dragon’s emotions with taunts of all manners.

The Polar-Man was an average fighter when hand-to-hand was concerned while Dragon was a skilled fighter with knowledge of several military martial-arts styles like Sanshou but the Polar-Man compensated for this disadvantage by fighting dirty and keeping Dragon off-balance by fueling his temper. When Dragon could stand no more he attacked the Polar-Man with an energy blast, directing bright red plasma at the Polar-Man’s chest. The Polar-Man had never experienced the like, he felt like there was ice rolling down his chest. The plasma was so hot that it felt cold, the feeling of nerves being killed off. But the Polar-Man countered with a viscous jab to Dragon’s lower torso, nearly breaking one of Dragon’s ribs. Dragon’s tongue slid in between his teeth as the Polar-Man delivered an uppercut, practically cutting Dragon’s tongue off. It was hanging by a thin bridge of tissue and Dragon’s pain was immense, but he kept on fighting, delivering a stirring blow to the Polar-Man’s recently injured hand. The Polar-Man knew he couldn’t give away his weakness so through an immense amount of will-power he disguised the pain that he felt in his broken hand. Just so that there would be no doubts he used that very hand to deliver a counter-attack to Dragon’s face. Dragon answered with a head butt to the Polar-Man’s nose, breaking it and causing the Polar-Man to howl in pain and frustration.

Both Dragon and the Polar-Man healed minor injuries quicker than normal humans but that didn’t mean they were any less painful in the short run. The portion of the contest where they tried to outfight one another using their skills was over, now there was only a fumbling struggle between two enraged men. It was less boxing and more wrestling now. Speed and agility were no longer factors, all that mattered was strength. The two men attempted to overpower each other but were quite evenly matched in the departments of brute strength and raw force. Dragon’s advantage was his versatility of powers and his martial skill while the Polar-Man’s advantage was his sharp mind. In a struggle of muscle against muscle both men found themselves robbed of their respective advantages and as such neither of them could gain the upper hand. At least until the Polar-Man gathered enough of his senses to try to use the environment to fight. Taking a deep breath while simultaneously ramming Dragon in the stomach with his elbow to knock the wind out of him, the Polar-Man pulled him and his opponent down into the water. Then it was a struggle to hold Dragon still long enough for his breath to run out and for the water to intrude into his lungs.

that was great! what is the next chapter about? is briquette going to try to escape? where did mister magnificent go after his visit with the polar man????

Briquette is of two minds, one part of her is the suppressed supervillainess that definitely wants to escape while the other part is the frightened and hopeless prisoner who really doesn't know what to do.

Chapter 15: Malibu.

Avenger woke up after what was probably a few hours of lying unconscious on the beach. She felt her damaged and thoroughly exhausted body being cradled by strong arms and she felt the wind rushing through her hair. Paragon had found her lying on the beach with a small crowd of curious children gathered around her, poking her with long sticks and wondering if she were dead. When he arrived he found the children daring each other to remove her cowl but none of them had the courage to get too close to her.

“Next time you go to a Kegger on the beach will you tell me?” Paragon asked jovially.
“Don’t you know what happened?” Avenger asked. Her voice was tired and weak rather than sharp and obstinate as it usually was.
“Well I know that you were passed out on a beach, with a broken beach house behind you and a skid in the sand. So I’m thinking either you were in a fight or you were partying a little too hard. If it’s the former try not to bleed on me, if it’s the latter please don’t bleed on me or vomit on me. Just please don’t bleed on Me.”
“Don’t worry I’m not bleeding.” Avenger lied; she could feel blood trickling down her legs and down to her toes.
“Have you looked at your leg?” Paragon asked.
“Oh God, what’s wrong with my leg?” Avenger asked worriedly trying to lift her head to look down.
“Nothing,” Paragon said, “Except your calf muscle has been peeled back and the back of your fibula is visible. Other than that its fine.”

“Oh good… I was worried for a moment that something was seriously wrong.” She sounded relieved as if she thought it was a minor injury. “If I pass out again, promise me you won’t get any ideas.” She said with a wry smile. Paragon had become accustomed to her sense of humor over time. Her humor was rarely funny in a conventional sense, but she always seemed to get a kick out of it. When it wasn’t crude it was always macabre or dark in some way.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
“Yeah, Dragon happened.” Avenger replied flatly.
“When you say Dragon, do you mean the Chinese hero Dragon?”
“Are there any other Dragons you know of?”
“What was he doing here?” Paragon asked.
“He was looking for a fight, probably with Mister Magnificent,” Avenger answered, “But he got me instead.” She managed a wide grin.

“Judging from the fact that you’re not jelly on the sand and he’s nowhere to be found, I take it you won.” Paragon said, with some awe at the notion.
“I managed to hold my own but if it wasn’t for some timely help I would be jelly right now.” Avenger admitted.
“Help from whom?” Paragon asked. Avenger rolled her eyes; did he always have to use proper grammar?
“I don’t know who it was; all I saw before passing out was a man in white with a beard… I think that’s what it was.” Paragon’s expression hardened, as did his grip on Avenger, “Whoa, easy there cowboy don’t bruise the fruit.” She managed another wide grin.

“Sorry, it’s just…” he trailed off, “Are you sure he had a beard?” Paragon asked with great concern.
“I’m not sure of anything, I may have been imagining it, and all I know is that someone stopped Dragon from punching a hole through my head. And for that I’m thankful. Is something wrong? You’re acting all Paragon-ish all of the sudden. Did you leave the oven on or something?” Paragon always got tense when he thought something was amiss.
“No it’s just… I think Dragon may be in serious trouble.” Paragon said.
“And I should care because…?” Avenger asked, not feeling any concern for Dragon’s safety.
“Let’s just get you to a hospital.” Paragon said, ending the conversation.

An Excerpt from: ‘Deconstructing the Indestructible: a study of the world’s most powerful man.’ By Sir John Talbot, 1993:

“He may appear human, but appearances can be, and in my experience as a researcher are quite frequently deceptive. Nowhere is the above adage any truer than in the case of Mister Magnificent, the American icon and hero who for the last five decades has been the closest thing there is to a God on Earth. Yes I do use the word God for there is no other way to describe such a being. Surely the title of ‘man’ no longer fits such a specimen. No man can fly to the sun and back, split a moon in half, or survive without food, air, water, or sleep. When I was asked to give this ‘man’ an examination I practically jumped at the offer. The tests I was to perform were for the benefit of government propaganda, most likely in response to the Chinese propaganda vaunting their new hero ‘Dragon’. The tests were simple ones, strength, durability, and speed tests. But I was less interested in those tests and more interested in other, less mechanical revelations. Psychology is not one of my fields of expertise, but in this case it was my greatest interest. I already knew that Mister Magnificent was unkillable and unstoppable, what I wanted to know was whether or not he was unbreakable in the mental sense. In between tests I would ask him questions. The nature of these questions alternated between innocuous trivia and deep probing into his subconscious. I asked him about his childhood and his family, and then I asked him about his sexual history and his fears. Finding out what an unstoppable, undying superbeing feared was more interesting to me than finding out how much he could lift. Though he no longer required sleep to recharge his body and mind he still slept whenever he could find the time. He slept in a sensory deprivation pod; it was the only way he could sleep given his immensely sensitive hearing. When he slept he dreamed, and what strange dreams he dreamt. He told me about one in particular, a dream wherein he would open his mouth to speak, but being unable to control his voice the sound waves would flay the flesh off people’s bones. Then he would lose control of his strength, crushing people who he came into contact with. He would fly so far and so fast that he would be on the opposite end of the universe, lost and alone. Indeed I came to understand that this dream was less fantasy and more grim reality. No doubt he cannot shake a man’s hand without applying an inhuman amount of restraint. I drew two conclusions from the tests and from my own questions. Firstly I concluded that the true ceiling of his abilities has yet to be reached and that as time goes on his powers grow geometrically. Secondly I concluded that while he has the body of a God in human form, his mind is as fragile as any man’s and perhaps even more so. The only thing that Mister Magnificent fears is Mister Magnificent.”

That was really good. I really like how you have added the additional information in partictular chapters. It helps me understand the charator/s and how the rest of the world may precieve them. I have only one question... About Avenger calf, is it really in that bad of shape or was that just a scarcastic remark from Paragon?

She just redirected a Superman/Thor level being's charge, yeah she's lucky to even have a leg. It goes to show you what sort of person Avenger is the way she treats what you or I would consider a grievous injury as a minor wound.

I'm not really proud of Chapter 16, if I have to cut down the book on the request of the prospective publisher it will definitely be one of the subtractions.

Chapter 16: The Arctic Circle.

Everywhere there were sharp instruments connected to robotic probes and pale blue lights that illuminated the probes and nothing more, beyond them was darkness. Dragon couldn’t see much farther than a few feet from his face, and as a result he didn’t know how large the room he was in really was. He was immobilized by metal restraints, but it was more than just simple steel that held him in place. The metal was incredibly powerful, a hundred times as powerful as steel but the metal alone was not what kept Dragon where he was. Some invisible force kept him from moving his arms or his legs and there were enough sedatives in his blood-stream to put down a small army of elephants. Dragon had never lost a fight in his life until just a week ago, now he seemed to be slipping, two technical losses in one day. Losing to the Polar-Man may have been somewhat forgivable, but losing to Avenger? He would never live it down.

But Dragon knew he had more important things to worry about, namely what the Polar-Man intended to do to him, and if anyone knew he was there. The Polar-Man was not an enemy that Dragon had dealt with regularly and as such Dragon didn’t entirely know what to expect but he knew one thing: the Polar-Man really liked experimentation and he liked taking things apart. The Polar-Man had been standing at one far corner of the dark room, monitoring the life signs of his ‘guest’ and monitoring the skies once more for signs of any aerial objects violating his airspace. When he saw that Dragon had become lucid once more he didn’t stir for some time, knowing that Dragon would still be too groggy to truly appreciate the circumstances. The Polar-Man was a lover of the grand and the fantastic, always preferring to wait until the moment was right to show off how amazing his fortress was.

“Where the hell am I?” Dragon asked in Mandarin.
“You my friend,” the Polar-Man placed a hand on a switch, “Are in my lair.” The Polar-Man pulled the switch which failed to do anything. He frowned and pulled it again and again with the same results. The fourth attempt finally yielded the desired result and everywhere around the massive room lights came on. The Polar-Man’s eyes lit up with pride and satisfaction. There were blue lights, yellow lights, white lights, and a few red lights but they all had the purpose of the most dramatic lighting possible. Showy computer screens and blinking buttons with no apparent purpose besides visual effect cropped up everywhere. Redundancies abounded everywhere with about six identical consoles surrounding a single particle accelerator to give the appearance that more than one man operated it. The Polar-Man looked at his ‘guest’s’ eyes to see if the desired effect had set in.

“I’m not impressed,” Dragon replied with a surly frown, knowing exactly what the Polar-Man didn’t want to hear, “Now let me go before I turn your little club-house inside out, you along with it. If you expect my government to give you money-”
“-Appearances aside I had loftier goals than simple ransom when accosting you.” The Polar-Man offered as sincere a smile as he could manage given his fulsome nature.
“Like what?”
“In good time, Dragon, all in good time. I just need something from you; I need a way to contact your superiors. I have a very interesting proposition for them.”

though it was a shorter chapter than the others, it did give some valuable information towards the polar-man's plans and it gives the reader a chance to think about what is going to happen. I liked it.

I think the story is a very good read (remember, I've only had time to skim it here and there so far) but that up there is excellent.
I hope you don't give up writing or get bored of it. I may not be a literary critic, but your writing is better than many a book and comic I've read.

Yeah it's not terrible it just isn't great.

Chapter 17: Pacific Ocean.

The skies were a gray color, the same color as milky tea, while the oceans below were a sickly smoky hue. The colors of his surroundings matched Paragon’s mood which was decidedly perturbed. Jade Empress as always seemed cheerful, though how much of it was just an act was beyond Paragon.
“What’s so important that we couldn’t talk over the phone, Ted?” Jade Empress asked.
“It has to do with your Dragon.” Paragon replied in a business-like tone that Jade Empress didn’t much care for.
“So he’s mine now is he?” Jade Empress asked.
“You know what he did, don’t you?” Paragon asked.
“He’s the leader. We don’t contact him, he contacts us. And the only people who have any sort of legal authority over him are the President, the General Secretary, and the Premier. So forgive me if I don’t know his every inane move.”
“No need to get defensive, I haven’t even told you what he’s done yet.”
“Is it that bad?” Jade Empress asked.

“No its worse, I’m afraid he showed up on the California coast demanding Mister Magnificent show himself.”
“And Mister Magnificent beat him to within an inch of his life?” Jade Empress asked, not so much concerned as much as embarrassed.
“No, Avenger fought him.”
“Is she dead?”
“No, he wasn’t able to lay a hand on her.”
“He must have been too distracted by his rage to focus; I’ve seen it happen before. Where is Dragon now?” Jade Empress asked; the stern look on Paragon’s face unnerved her.
“I’m afraid I don’t know that, but I have an idea of where he may be.”
“Yes?”

“Avenger said she saw someone stop Dragon before he could cause some serious harm to her.” Paragon began.
“Who did she see?” Jade Empress interrupted him, anxious to know who might have been able to stop Dragon when he was enraged.
“She said she saw someone wearing white, with a beard.” Paragon said, putting extra emphasis on the ‘beard’ part.
“You don’t think…” Jade Empress’s expression changed from quiet optimism to blank staring. A rotten feeling had just opened up in her stomach and a chill rolled down her neck and spine, she feared what Paragon was about to say.
“I think the Polar-Man may have taken him somewhere.” Paragon said.
“But why?” Jade Empress asked, “What could he want from Dragon?”
“Aside from the obvious you mean? Well there are quite a few things that a man like the Polar-Man could want from a person like Dragon, perhaps he needs a lab rat, or perhaps he just wants to talk. But I’m inclined to think it was something much more sinister on his part. After all he could have taken Avenger too, but for some reason he left her lying on her back.”

“Maybe he thought that two captives would be too much trouble?” Jade Empress posited.
“No, he doesn’t think like that. He has a plan he has to follow, always. Avenger just wasn’t part of the plan and could have only complicated things for him and his plan. He needed Dragon, for what purpose I can’t say.”
“Do you think Dragon is all right?” Jade Empress asked.
“I don’t know but I hope so. He may be a moronic brute but he’s still a hero.” Paragon replied.
“That depends on your definition of hero,” Jade Empress rolled her eyes, “Picking fights with foreign supers and then getting kidnapped isn’t very heroic if you ask me.”
“I need to go back and check up on Avenger, just promise me that you’ll be extra careful whatever happens next.” Paragon said. Great concern was evident in both his expression and his tone.
“I always am,” Jade Empress replied, insulted slightly at him being protective of her, “Do any of your team mates ever get mad at you for being such a self-assured-?”
“-All the time,” Paragon cut in with a smile, “Avenger once told me that giving guilt-trips was my primary power.”
“Smart girl, no wonder she was able to beat Dragon.” Jade Empress giggled.
“Hopefully next time we talk it will be on better terms,” Paragon said.
“Do you always have to talk like that?” Jade Empress asked.

“Of course,” Paragon replied. Jade Empresses’ ear buzzed with activity, she was being paged by her superiors. A flood of orders poured out telling her of new plans and realities that she had to conform to. She attempted to act naturally so as not to alert Paragon. “Are you all right?” He asked, “You look nervous.”
“Oh it’s just, I just… I remembered something.” She tried her best to deflect his attention. After some awkward silence Jade Empress flew off, blowing a parting kiss to a still and stoic Paragon. Paragon felt a bit insulted. Had she forgotten that his powers allowed him to listen in on radio waves? His own Mandarin was poor but he knew enough to understand that there was to be a meeting.

Chapter 18: Los Angeles.

Avenger was one of the few heroes who genuinely had something to lose should her disguise be blown. Unlike Bombshell who had no disguise (and was an orphan) and Paragon who had no loved ones to protect, Avenger had two nephews that depended on her as their guardian. She also had a lot of enemies in Los Angeles. Her foes ranged from simple thugs who had the bad luck to stumble into her during a crime and wanted revenge for a broken collarbone and obsessive serial killers who looked on the Avenger as the ‘Holmes’ to their ‘Moriarty’. She had undergone surgery to repair the damaged muscle and bone around her leg during which time she was administered low-grade anesthetic (on her request) to dull the pain but still keep her awake.

She was attended to at all times by Bombshell who knew that if she wasn’t there to stop interns and orderlies from trying to peel back the cowl Avenger would have to be the one to do it, with painful results for those foolish enough to try to unmask her. After the operation was successfully concluded Avenger was moved into a bed in the area of the hospital reserved for severe but non-critical cases so that she could rest. But Avenger didn’t rest, she was too busy using the time to try to get and know Bombshell better. Bombshell told her about herself and her childhood and then showed Avenger a picture of her boyfriend. The man was young, perhaps even younger than Bombshell and from Avenger’s experience his thin face and broad smile meant that he probably wasn’t even out of College yet. He had dark curly hair, warm brown eyes and very little muscle tone.

“So you’re dating a normie, then?” Avenger gave a short cackle, briefly throwing her head back in doing so.
“I wish you wouldn’t call Jeff a normie.” Bombshell said, offended by her use of the word.
“Why not, that’s what he is, isn’t it?” Avenger had trouble understanding the line between abrasive and vitriolic when dealing with her friends and allies. “I mean yeah I guess I can see why you like him, he’s cute and he looks nice but…”
“But what?” Bombshell crossed her arms while Avenger stared at the photo and grinned wolfishly.
“But I don’t like little nice guys, I like ‘em big and mean and besides, I learned a long time ago that supers shouldn’t date normies, it ends badly, usually for the normie.”

“You’re just jaded because the one time you tried it you found him stuffed into a refrigerator.”
“Oven, it was a Pizza Oven, and it wasn’t the first time. In the last fifteen years I’ve had only six boyfriends: two of them were supers, four were normies. Neither Mister Magnificent nor Paragon are dead but three of the four normies are dead.”
“What happened to the fourth one?” Bombshell asked.
“Oh, he got married, moved to New Jersey and became a lawyer for some big rich family.” Avenger said matter-of-factly.
“It sounds to me like he did alright,” Bombshell replied dryly.
“Sure, if you call New Jersey ‘alright’.” Avenger answered caustically.
“Wait, when did you and Mister Magnificent…?” Bombshell began.
“Oh I suppose you wouldn’t call it dating, the more proper word would be tryst. That was when I was still ‘the Avenger’, before I became: Avenger. You know, back in the late eighties when I was still a vigilante. You know there is a reason they call him Magnificent.” She gave yet another wolfish grin.

“Why’d you two stop?” Bombshell asked.
“Broken bones, a lot of broken bones, plus uhh some other complications, suffice it to say he could never ‘be all that he wanted to be’ without killing me,” Avenger laughed, “So when are Ted and Jimmy going to show up to dote on me?” Avenger asked.
“Jimmy said he wishes you well but needs a vacation, so he’s somewhere in Las Vegas, and Paragon said he’d be here after taking care of something.”
“Hmm, he was flying westward when he left, I remember that, so that must be Paragon-speak for going to play twister with Jade Empress.” Avenger said with some venom apparent in her voice.
“You’re not jealous are you?” Bombshell smiled wickedly.
“Jealous? Jealous of what? I stopped seeing Paragon when I figured out how much of a—”
“—Self-righteous prick I was. Yes, we all know.” Paragon opened the windows without touching them and glided through the opening in time to finish Avenger’s sentence.
“God I hate it when you do that.” Avenger snarled.
“So no one tried to unmask her?” Paragon asked.

“Decowl,” Avenger corrected him.
“Decowl isn’t a word.” Paragon answered back.
“Oh they tried, but I was quite firm with them.” Bombshell answered.
“So you threatened to blow up any hand that touched the mask?” Paragon asked.
“Cowl,” Avenger snapped, Paragon ignored her.
“More or less, yeah,” Bombshell said cheerfully.
“Well we have a difficult situation on our hands,” began Paragon.
“I’ll say, no matter how many times I ask for orange they always give me Lime,” Avenger was referring to her hospital gelatin desserts. She poked the wriggling green blob with visible disgust in her face, “God, I hate Lime.”
“What I meant was we can’t just stay here and watch Avenger to make sure no one get’s handsy with the mask.”
“Cowl,” Avenger corrected, “Masks are stupid little things that cover the upper-part of your face, cowls cover most of your head and connect to your cape.”

“Oh whatever,” Paragon snapped back, his patience having run out with Avenger, “I was hoping that this injury might have instilled some semblance of humility in you.”
“Nope, still me,” Avenger answered with her third wolfish grin of the day.
“I suppose it was too much to hope—” Paragon stopped mid-sentence, his face frozen in shock as if he had just seen a ghost.
“What’s wrong?” Bombshell asked innocently, not recognizing the idiosyncratic “frozen-face” that came over Paragon whenever a massive EM disturbance was close by. Avenger recognized it right away. His helmet was screaming with violent feedback and horrible beeping and his ears felt like they were going to bleed because of the infernal racket.
“Company?” Avenger asked calmly.

“You could say that,” Paragon replied, staring out the open window at a small dot of pale blue light that was growing on the horizon as every second passed. Everywhere throughout the hospital machines flickered for brief moments, doctors and nurses gasped as life support machines alternated between on and off several times a second. Bombshell’s long silky blonde hair which she had taken great pains in keeping that way became frizzy and lifted up as if a balloon was being rubbed against it. In a short time the small dot of pale blue light grew into the recognizable form of a man. Mister Magnificent had arrived. He stepped through the open window, having to duck his head low to get inside. His grip on the wall must have (to him) been a light one, but it ended up putting five finger shaped craters into the drywall.
“Sorry I’m late; I came as soon as I heard the news,” Mister Magnificent tried in vain to offer a smile to Avenger but there was too much bothering him for a smile to properly form. The others gazed at him with more awe than usual, and orderlies and patients who were passing by dropped whatever they were carrying and stared stupidly. Surrounding his well-toned and ageless body was a pale blue glow and an intermittent crackle of blue plasma that danced an inch away from the surface of his skin and clothing. His unnaturally blue eyes were of an even less Earthly hue, now almost a metallic color.

“Yeah… well if no one else is going to say it, your aura is showing,” Avenger said. Mister Magnificent looked at his hands and gasped, as if he hadn’t noticed it. He closed his eyes briefly and the glow faded and the crackling plasma dissipated into nothingness. He moved a single foot to approach Avenger but looked down first, the smell of burning linoleum assaulting his nostrils. He saw to his shock an inch deep footprint into the hospital’s tile flooring. The print wasn’t created by pressure or force; it looked like it was burned in. Mister Magnificent was allowing his power to slip out and become ambient energy, taking many forms including heat, static electricity, and of course various electromagnetic waves that were interfering with all the hospital’s electronic medical equipment and were giving Paragon a serious headache with feedback.

“Derrick we need to talk about a few things.” Paragon got close to him but was nervous about touching him; he didn’t want to end up like the floor, burnt to a crisp with just a brief moment of contact with Mister Magnificent’s person.
“What did I do?” Mister Magnificent asked despairingly.
“You broke into ‘the Tomb’ and attempted to spring Briquette out.” Paragon informed him.
“Oh God,” He sounded shocked and rueful, “But I don’t remember that.” Mister Magnificent’s aura began to return but he noticed this and the incipient build-up of power was halted.
“Well it happened; I had a talk with Briquette about your little escapade to put it lightly.” Paragon said.
“You mean she didn’t try to kill you?” Mister Magnificent had a sudden spark in his eye from the mention of Briquette; she held a special place in his mind a sort of forbidden fruit just out of his reach.
“No she seems to have reformed; even when you offered to take her with you she stayed behind,” Paragon wasn’t sure if reformed was the right word, broken perhaps would be more apposite.

“Did I hurt anyone?” Mister Magnificent grabbed Paragon by the shoulders and shook him lightly. Paragon feared that he would squeeze him too hard and that his organs would pop out of his body but Mister Magnificent had control enough not to hurt him.
“You… sort of burned a prison guard’s hand.” Paragon said, fearing Mister Magnificent’s next move immensely.
“Oh God,” He repeated, “Avenger what happened to you?” He asked, looking at her injured leg with an expression of severe regret, wishing he could have been there to prevent it from ever being injured.
“Dragon came looking for you, and when you weren’t around he decided that I would be a good substitute.” Avenger said neutrally.

“Well let me look at it.” Mister Magnificent brushed past Paragon and placed a hand on Avenger’s hurt leg; a small crackle of plasma spiraled around his hand for a millisecond’s time then disappeared. As if by magic the wound that had been stitched up began to close up and the coloration returned to normal. He took the end of the stitch and gingerly pulled it out, revealing a completely healed leg. “There,” he said with a smile, “Try it out,” Avenger got out of her bed and decided (in typical fashion) to test it out by stomping as hard as she could on the floor. Everyone with the exception of Mister Magnificent was shocked, “Careful now, it may be healed up but it’s not perfectly fine yet, you’ll still need to rest It.”
“How…did…you…?” Paragon stammered and tried to find the words but failed. Mister Magnificent had developed new powers before, usually without telling anyone else before using them. But this was just unreal.
“I found out a little while ago that I can apply my powers to reconstruct things, including organic tissue. That was just my way of apologizing for not being there when you needed me.” He smiled at Avenger hoping that she would return the smile; she of course did not reciprocate.

“Derrick, if you want to find a way to make up for the way you’ve been acting recently, try acting like a Goddamn hero again and stop running around the world committing crimes and then conveniently forgetting things.”
“Lorena, please,” Paragon snapped, thinking she had gone too far, “She doesn’t mean—” Paragon turned back to where Mister Magnificent was but discovered that he had already left. Once again Bombshell’s hair began to frizz up and around the hospital machines flickered and sputtered.

this is really good! it makes me want to keep reading it, and it has a sertain level of excitement and mystery mixed in!!!

Here's the end of the 'First Act'
Chapter 19: Las Vegas.

Sometimes the people of the Vegas Strip are treated to some truly interesting sights. A good example of this is when a superhero comes in for a vacation. Now the Guardian had the misfortune of being in the group of superhumans who had trouble hiding their powers with a disguise. In his case he had begun putting on weight when he turned seventeen, a lot of weight. It wasn’t all fat, about eighty-five percent of it was muscle but the visual effect was still the same: a massive barrel chest and tree-trunk like limbs. He would have looked obese if not for the fact that he stood at nearly seven feet tall. When men, women, and children all saw a taxi cab leaning far to one side pull up they didn’t know what to expect. As soon as its occupant, a massive dark-skinned man with huge hands and a plain but recognizable face left the vehicle it lurched in the opposite direction as if an Elephant had just stepped off. Some of the people immediately recognized him as the Guardian, and a few people started taking pictures. Of course it was only a few people, he wasn’t one of the A-List heroes.

Had it been Mister Magnificent there would have been a full complement of photographers and reporters ready to fish for front page quotes and snap pictures of his every movement. Next in popularity was Avenger who was still considered mysterious and thus interesting even after many years as a government sanctioned hero, then came Bombshell for obvious reasons. When a set of nude pictures surfaced on the internet there was a media frenzy surrounding them, only for the original author of the pictures to admit it was simply her face doctored onto the body of a famous actress/model. Bombshell never made an official comment. Paragon wasn’t very popular in America but in Japan he was bigger than most Japanese heroes, it had something to do with his helmet apparently. The Guardian wasn’t very popular firstly because his powers weren’t considered flashy or amazing, he couldn’t fly and he couldn’t shoot lasers from his eyes and everyone and their mother had super-strength these days. An oft overheard query that always made the Guardian angry was ‘what can he do that Mister Magnificent can’t?’ The fact that the Guardian could never think of a good response was always troubling. He needed this vacation to rest his body and his mind after three straight months of putting out fires and stopping bank robberies. When the other heroes were busy fighting super-terrorists it was always him who had to guard the home-front and make sure that criminals didn’t forget why breaking the law was a bad idea.

Part of him wanted fame and wanted a throng of reporters following him around but the other part of him was thankful that he could do his job in peace without having to worry about the media following his every move. Well, as much peace as is possible in his line of work. Still he had received congratulatory calls from heroes around the world when news arrived that he had beaten Demon and sent him flying into orbit. He had heard of Avenger being injured fighting Dragon and while he wanted to visit her and see if she was alright two things kept him from doing so. Firstly was his need for a vacation and secondly was the fact that one way or another Avenger didn’t care if he was there or not. He just really needed a vacation.

Chapter 20: Chinese-Russian Border.

The winds picked up dust and sand and sent swirling waves of particulate matter into the eyes of the assembled troops. Their eyes watered as the foreign particles embedded themselves but they never winced, rubbed their eyes, or complained for they were men of iron. It was a few miles outside of the town of Babushkin, in what used to be Soviet Russian territory where the Polar-Man had asked to meet with representatives of the People’s Republic of China. During the early 1980’s when the Cold War turned hot China was a marginal ally of the West for the purpose of taking advantage of Russian weakness and taking control of Mongolia, the northern-most section of Vietnam, part of Laos, some of the Korean Peninsula, and of course a juicy portion of Eastern Siberia all the way west to Lake Baikal.

They also took advantage of the West’s tied hands to invade and take control of Taiwan which was promptly renamed Taipei Province. There had never been a Republic of China; it had always been Taipei Province. That was the official policy of the PRC toward Taipei Province. The town of Babushkin had rarely been host to such a large procession of men and materiel, at least not since the original Chinese invasion in ’82. There were nearly sixty tanks present including fifteen Type-99’s, thirty Type-96’s, and even a dozen or so Type-106 ‘Super-Tanks’, the newest and most powerful tanks in the Chinese Arsenal and next to the joint American-EU developed M-2 Griffon MBT was the most powerful tank in existence. There were also two dozen Heavy AA weapons, a cavalcade of transport trucks, and of course a plethora of infantry. And to top it off the two most powerful Chinese Superhumans: Jade Empress and Dragon were standing guard over the rendezvous point. The commander of the assembled forces (discounting the two superhumans who answered only to the most powerful of political leaders) was the highly-respected officer General Tung Qichang.

He was a veteran of numerous border-skirmishes with India and Russia as well as a hero of the Cold War conflict with Russia during which he (as a Major) led a small tank unit deep into Russian territory and successfully engaged, defeated, and captured an enemy force three times the size of his own. He had a reputation both inside and outside China as a sort of General Patton for two reasons: first was his demeanor which westerners often described as ‘bulldoggish’, and second was his enthusiasm for poetry. His poetry much like Patton’s fluctuated between masterful and excremental but was always stirring and germane to the soldiers who read it. Unlike Patton he had never struck a soldier, though there had been many times when he had a mind to. Even China’s military won’t tolerate abuse of its soldiers by their commanders. Tung was a man of average height but stocky and commanding in spite of his modest vertical inclination. His face was unforgettable with a strong jaw and two fierce black eyes, his hair was black as tar on the top and the sides until it reached the temples and it met the stark white hair of his temples. Another trait that he shared with Patton was his ownership of a special side-arm that stood out from the standard issue service pistol.


General Tung always carried two things with him: a pocket issue of the Little Red Book (which he only used to scribble down poetic verses as they came to him) and a special Gold-plated Tokarev TT-30. The pistol was admittedly garish, but such was the style of the Russian Tank Commander he had ‘liberated’ it from. Tung had worked hard to get the stench of cheap cologne and perfume-scented cigarette smoke out of it but even after more than twenty years of use the weapon still smelt like the Russian. Dragon had been excited to meet the General, as General Tung was one of the few men he held any approbation for, but when he met him he was disappointed by the man’s aloofness. Still he was the right person for the job, having already deployed his soldiers out in a manner that in case of a sudden betrayal on the part of their imminent guest it would be impossible for all of them to be destroyed in one stroke. This was rather contrary to what the assembled politicians had in mind when they arrived. They wanted the Polar-Man to see China’s military might first hand, to have a mass of soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder, the long and erect barrels of the tanks’ guns stretching over their heads and pointing toward the Polar-Man. General Tung knew that this was both impractical and ridiculous, he even pointed out the Freudian implications when he heard one of the politicians use the word ‘erect’ to refer to how he wanted the tanks’ guns to look.

With a smoldering Cold-War era Cuban cigar clenched firmly in his iron jaw, spitting acrid smoke into the eyes of the politicians, General Tung calmly informed the suit-wearing throng of bureaucrats that he would leave the hand-shakes and document-signing to them and would greatly appreciate it if they left the troop deployment to him. Unsurprisingly that was the end of it, General Tung got his way and the troops were deployed in spread out but interlocking positions in a semi-circular pattern around a quarter of a mile wide which encircled the meeting point. Shallow trenches, rifle pits, and even a few deep reinforced foxholes were dug hastily by the soldiers in order to provide for some cover, the tanks also had been sequestered in areas where the terrain had dipped to allow for a lower profile and areas that were easy to pull back from in case retreat became necessary. The anti-air defenses were arranged in a perfect arc one hundred yards in length stretching from one farm house to an animal pen. Tung felt an immense amount of pride for the expediency of his men and their efficiency in preparing for their guest’s arrival, not only had they accomplished their assigned tasks with thirty minutes to spare but they had also refrained from ever complaining though they had plenty of things to complain about. Tung’s troops loved him not because of his personality or any sort of lenience but because of his fairness and his integrity. If he told his soldiers they were going to march they would march and if he told them they could rest then he would do everything in his power to make certain that nothing happened that would rob the men of their rest even if he had to do some of their obligations for them. In one case he had promised his tired unit an afternoon of recreation after a brutal border skirmish with Indian forces only to receive orders from his superiors telling him that his unit was to go on recon and scout the enemy positions.

Having made a promise to his soldiers Tung went alone with only his loyal driver, his Little Red Book, and his pistol and dodged enemy fire, making note of enemy positions and fulfilling the task by himself. Appearances aside there were few men more sentimental than General Tung. This was reflected in his choice of a meeting site. The Polar-Man had demanded it be somewhere in China but preferably far to the North. Babushkin was an obvious choice for Tung, this had been the town where his long drive into Soviet territory ended with the engagement that made him a hero and forced the Soviet Union to negotiate a cease-fire. When the Polar-Man arrived Tung was one of the few people not to change their stance or tremble a bit in his presence. Tung scanned the hands, faces, and legs of the assemble personages for it was those areas that betrayed fear. If their legs shook then it was always a sign of trepidation, if the face looked tense then that meant the same, but hands more than anything demonstrated a person’s inner-calm or lack thereof. Tung noted the faces of his soldiers, some of them showed a respectable calm while others were forgivably tensed up. Until very recently the Polar-Man was a super-criminal in all but title, having meetings with his board members while still partially in costume. He was known for being amicable unless provoked in which case he could unleash incredible violence on anyone unlucky enough to be within reach of his hands. The men were in this case more a deterrent for the Polar-Man than their guns were, as he had no doubt that if it came to it quite a few of them would engage him in hand-to-hand and he didn’t like getting blood on his clothing, what with his stark-white color scheme.

While the Polar-Man was descending his eyes met for a moment with the eyes of General Tung and in that moment the Polar-Man saw through the wall of bureaucrats and saw the man who was truly in charge of the operation. He would shake hands with as many bureaucrats as China could offer, he could even sign a blood pact with the President and the General Secretary but in order for the deal to succeed he had to convince men like General Tung that he would be a good ally. Tung didn’t know what to make of the Polar-Man from first impressions. He made a mental note though that if he wasn’t a super-strong genius with the ability to fly at speeds that put most Fighter Interceptors to shame he would have looked ridiculous wearing what he had on. Rather than stiffen and tense up when he arrived, the soldiers would have instead broken out laughing. Such was the aura of a superhuman; these creatures could get away with the most outlandish appearances and still be awe-inspiring. Perhaps the fact that they were almost always (without much explanation) in good shape was a factor, and in Jade Empress’s case Tung knew she would look “awe-inspiring” no matter what she wore.

Due to his sharp military attire Dragon would have looked intimidating with powers or without powers, Tung respected that, what he didn’t respect was the fact that Dragon had been defeated and captured by the Polar-Man. This was shameful and it was borderline disrespectful for Dragon to pretend like it didn’t happen and that he had spoken on behalf of China to the Polar-Man rather than what had actually occurred. The Polar-Man touched down less than four feet from the nearest politician, nearer to Jade Empress than to Dragon. He said nothing at first, waiting for the Chinese to start up the conversation. The most senior politician nudged the man right in front of him to ‘break the ice’. The man looked back at the older politician suppliantly but was met by a stern stare urging him to just do it. And so he did, he started to mouth out the greeting and the words tumbled out of his mouth clumsily and tripped over one another, he had to start the first introductory sentence over three times before finally saying: ‘It is good to meet you.’

“The feeling is of course, mutual.” The Polar-Man said with a slight bow (more of a head bob really). He extended his right hand toward the nervous man who had greeted him. The little man took his hand and shook it limply. While they were shaking hands the Polar-Man found himself staring at Jade Empress’s legs. They were fine, strong, and lean legs, the kind the Polar-Man couldn’t get enough of. The negotiations began soon after with the Polar-Man listing his demands to the flustered ambassadors before him. Dragon though silent was obviously holding back immense rage, he didn’t forgive defeats easily. Part way through the discussion the Polar-Man gestured toward General Tung, who had been sitting off in the shadows smoking, and asked the politicians who he was. They told him who he was, that he was General Tung, and the Polar-Man’s eyes lit up. “I thought so,” He said triumphantly, “I must say I’m flattered that you would send your best man to provide security, not to mention your best tanks. Is that a Type-106?”

“It is,” Grunted General Tung, who had begun to walk toward the throng of politicians.
“You see Chinese hardware is very important to my plan.” The Polar-Man said.
“Can you please tell us what your plan is?” Jade Empress asked with a professional tone.
“Simple, I know that for a long, long time your government has been looking for a way to kill the Unkillable, to end Mister Magnificent. With your help I believe I can accomplish it,” The Polar-Man smiled villainously, “I understand you’ve just completed an Orbital Launch Vehicle.”
“I can’t confirm or deny that.” General Tung said gruffly.
“Of course you can’t, it’s just that… well a large part of my plan involves space, there’s a certain satellite that just got put up there that I need to get down, I think you know what I’m referring to.”

“Oh yes, we know,” Jade Empress replied. The Chinese government had been tracking Demon for years now and they knew exactly what part of space he now called home and exactly when his orbit would decay.
“Good to see we’re on the same page. Now about that Launch Vehicle…”

From the private research log of Sir John Talbot- 1992-1993:

August 7th 1992:
“I don’t think the others understand the significance of this most recent breakthrough. The subject, a Mr. Ryan Whitfield, has become the first and only subject to survive the procedure. More than survive, he seems to have begun to develop some interesting new talents. To wit: one of my colleagues “accidently” nicked him with a scalpel and to everyone’s amazement (particularly the subject’s) the wound began to close and heal rapidly. I’m very excited for what the future holds for Mr. Agnew.”

August 15th 1992:
“At last my colleagues admit that I was right, and that they were wrong. The subject has exceeded even my quite liberal expectations for his performance by easily lifting a 330 kg engine block with a single arm and running a mile on the track in no more than one minute thirty seven seconds. To put that in perspective: before the treatment the subject could only manage to dead-lift sixty kilograms with both arms and his running speed was somewhat below average for a male of his age. I have great hopes for him. If good-old Uncle Sam wants a weapon, Uncle Sam gets his weapon. And what a weapon it is!”

September 2nd 1992:
“Unexpected muscle growth and pigmentary degeneration of the skin is nothing to be worried about. Sometimes I feel like I’m working with an odd assortment of fools and alarmists, they don’t understand greatness, they fear greatness! Some of them have begun to see the subject as a monster of some kind. He’s not becoming a monster, he’s becoming a God.”

September 15th 1992:
“They’ve named him Demon. Those myopic bastards, they don’t know what to do when faced with greatness so they demonize it and attach the stigma of monster to it. The subject isn’t monstrous, he’s beautiful. He is becoming something that they cannot hope to contain, something that will make Gods tremble. The potency of those sedatives they’re pumping into him is on the wane, as is the subject’s susceptibility to them.”

September 27th 1992:
“The subject has escaped; no doubt he’s rampaging throughout Los Angeles right now. It is difficult for me to write with my left hand, the subject broke, nay shattered my right arm. But I bear no ill will toward him. How could he tell the difference between me and my odious colleagues? But as they say every cloud has a silver lining, I think I know what went wrong with the subject. I think I can make a more stable solution.”

November 1st 1992:
“I have come to the conclusion that it was the healing factor that drove the subject to insanity; it was the out of control growth which would have caused him constant pain. I can only imagine what that’s like and what it could do to any man’s mind. So I will (with great regret) be leaving out that particular facet of the solution.” November 28th 1992:
“I have commenced with the tests; so far the animals have fared far better than those exposed to the previous six batches. Only one of the animals: a sickly Red Colobus Monkey has died. I was right it seems. Having removed the portion of the formula that would grant a super-advanced healing factor I have eliminated the possible side effects, namely the out-of-control growth and the cancerous tumors that developed on previous test subjects. It’s almost time for testing to commence with human subjects.”

December 8th 1992:
“There is some talk circulating throughout the facility that the project may be cancelled and disbanded, I can only hope that this isn’t true, I’m so close now. If necessary I’ll continue on my own with my own private savings as funds.”

January 1st 1993:
“I have after some careful consideration decided that I cannot risk testing this formula on another human being. It is too much power to give away to any aimless drifter or vagrant plucked from the streets. Such power must belong to someone of vision, of intelligence, someone of worth. I have decided that there is only one candidate worthy of such power: myself. It is the dawn of a new year, and a new age. I am to be a God.”
January 17th 1993:
“I feel ten years younger, completely reinvigorated and reborn. This morning on the way from my apartment to the car I chanced upon a lonely segment of rebar. I picked it up and without too much trouble managed to rip it apart like a wet rag. This is only the beginning.”
January 23rd 1993:
“I’ve noticed some changes beyond the enhanced strength and stamina, some… interesting changes. It would appear my hair is turning stark white. Some men would begin to panic but I am a researcher, I stay calm through all developments. Also I rather like it; it gives me a distinguished look. I think I’ll grow a beard to complement the image.”
February 1st 1993:
“The Project has officially been dismantled, its secret government charter revoked and its resources cannibalized by other new projects concerning things like the behavior of termites in zero gravity or some such nonsense. I’m to return to England soon now that my business here is concluded. I’m not worried about it, I’ve gotten what I came for, and I’m on the path to become something greater than a mere human. I’ve already noticed changes to my other functions, to say the least. I’m constantly brain-storming new ideas, new inventions, I’m reading at an enormously improved rate and my memory has improved. I remember every single letter of every word that everyone has said to me today. And as for my…performance… well suffice it to say that Crystal has noticed an improvement. It’s a shame she can’t come with me to England, she’s such a sweet girl. But how would I explain it to the wife?”

That is an interesting development on the story. that last bit imediatly makes me think that the Polar-man is or rather was the Sir John Talbot. it is interesting to hear of how Demon was created and what he once was. have you written past act one or was that all you have wrote so far? I would really like to see the rest of this, it is excellent!

That's exactly right, he is Sir John Talbot. I didn't actually think about it at first, it was halfway through the diary entry that I realized how villainous I was making Talbot sound, then I got the idea to make the two one in the same. It sort of makes the Polar-Man a more remarkable figure in that he made himself so to speak. Whereas Mister Magnificent sort of just 'lucked into' his powers, the Polar-Man used his own inventive genius to give himself powers. His diary entries sort of frame the story and flesh out the world around him.
And yes I've finished the book, all 56 chapters.

Chapter 21: Mount Fuji, Japan

On the leeward side of Mount Fuji, near the base of the great mountain, the aging hero Ishida Yoshiro, better known as the first Rising Sun had made a small home for himself and his large family. He had long since retired from superheroics and had passed down the Rising Sun mantle to his superhuman nephew Ishida Kaemon, wishing to live a peaceful life with his family and to leave superheroics to the young. He was the first recorded Japanese superhuman, having first manifested his powers at the young age of sixteen, in autumn of 1957 and served as Japan’s premier superhero until well into his fifties.

He finally passed down the mantle to his similarly powered nephew on New Year’s Day, 1997. Though he had roughly the same “flying-tank” power-set as Mister Magnificent and Iron Cross had he didn’t possess the Immortal trait that made them ageless. And though this meant that he would be unable to even use his powers in a decade or so (he was pushing seventy years old) he was glad of it for it meant that he wouldn’t have to live to see everyone he loved die. He didn’t appear to be in his late sixties, perhaps mid fifties but not nearly seventy. His hair was iron gray, the sort that hard-working men tend to have, and his face was only beginning to wrinkle. His most distinguishing characteristic in his old age were his eyebrows which seemed to grow exponentially in size with every passing year. They were like two gray caterpillars crawling over his eyes. He had a loving family that lived with him in his small mountainside cottage that consisted of his wife, his two daughters, their husbands, and their children.

It was a small house to be sure and despite the size of the family it never seemed crowded, even on the rare occasions when visitors came. Almost invariably the visitors would be there to see the head of the household, either as admirers, old friends and/or colleagues, and sometimes even old adversaries coming to bury the hatchet. On this particular day, at the time when Yoshiro was performing his daily ritual of preparing and consuming Green Tea (on his Doctor’s orders) a visitor came knocking. His youngest daughter was the one who came to answer the door and was surprised at who she saw. The visitor was unusual looking, even by the standards of a superhero’s relative. She had seen some odd people but never someone like the man who stood before her. He was large and powerfully built with a square jaw and strong shoulders, his hair was black and his eyes were of a peculiar hue somewhere between blue and gray.

He was clearly European as he certainly wasn’t from Japan and Americans and Australians didn’t dress like he did. He asked in barely intelligible Japanese if the man of the house was in. The woman pointed him toward the western side of the house where Yoshiro was drinking his tea. The house was one of those old fashioned places built with paper and wood doors, the fragility of the house was always something of a concern as Yoshiro could in his sleep roll over and wake up to find that an entire wall had been knocked over by his unconscious tumbling. He didn’t turn his head when he heard the door sliding open, or when he heard the sound of a large man’s footsteps.

He did turn his head when he heard the man speak however. It was unmistakable; no other man had ever butchered the Japanese language with such merciless mispronunciations. Michael Stern, known to the rest of the world as Iron Cross, was fluent in about seven languages outside of his native German tongue but spoke none of them particularly well. He had the heaviest Bavarian accent that anyone could ever imagine and even worse than that he had a bad habit of over-stressing certain syllables and under-stressing others to the point where his words could scarcely be called words at all. Looking up at Iron Cross, Yoshiro could not help but smile, Iron Cross in return beamed widely.
“It’s been a long time,” Yoshiro said, “What brings you here?” Realizing the hopelessness of trying to communicate in Japanese Yoshiro addressed him in English. Iron Cross’s English while certainly not anything to write home about was still passable.

“You mean I can’t just come here to say hello?” Iron Cross asked jokingly. Yoshiro gave him a bemused glance.
“Why are you really here?” he asked, “Is there something on your mind?” He could see right through Iron Cross’s conceits.
“I’ve been worrying about our old friend Mister Magnificent,” Iron Cross said his grin losing some of its power and almost transforming into a subtle frown.
“We’ve been over this haven’t we?” said Yoshiro with a smile, “Mister Magnificent is invulnerable, we need to worry about him.”
“That isn’t what I meant,” replied Iron Cross, “I’m worried about him, I’m worried that he might be having some problems, you know, problems in the head,” Iron Cross tapped his finger to his forehead.
“Oh?” Yoshiro had admittedly been out of touch for the last few years so he scarcely knew about anything that was going on with the world.

“He’s been getting to trouble spots with longer and longer response time and to some trouble spots too late to help. A week ago there was a Cruise Ship that was in trouble, and you know how Mister Magnificent always shows up when that many people are in trouble. But he never came, and I and Paragon had to save the ship instead.
“How is Paragon?” Yoshiro asked, changing the subject.
“He’s fine,” said Iron Cross impatiently, “Anyhow Mister Magnificent hasn’t been his old self lately.” He tried to get back on subject.
“Perhaps he’s just tired and needs rest?” Yoshiro suggested. Iron Cross shook his head, “Do you want some tea?” Yoshiro asked with a smile.
“No thank you, well maybe a little,” Iron Cross knew how futile it was to refuse any sort of offer from Yoshiro, and took a small cup of tea in his large hands, “I don’t think weariness has anything to do with it, well at least not in a physical sense. I mean I can go on for days without sleep, but Mister Magnificent… well he doesn’t even need air.” He took a sip from the piping hot cup of green tea. Had his tongue been anything less than invulnerable like the rest of his body he was sure he would have burnt it, Yoshiro loved serving his tea at near boiling temperature. It was the only way his incredibly durable tongue could feel anything.

“Perhaps one day,” Yoshiro began, “You will age just as I am aging; now I don’t know if that will ever happen, you look the same as when I first met you, but perhaps one day you will begin to grow old and frail. That is of course the natural way of things,” Iron Cross wasn’t sure where he was going with this but didn’t interrupt, “Mister Magnificent however, I do not believe he shall ever age —or die for that matter— no doubt he knows this, and no doubt he fears this more than anything, that I’m sure of. Mister Magnificent is a man trapped in a God’s body, and like any man he feels fear but it is not fear of death as you or I know it, rather I believe he fears life, he fears the prospect of endless life, of godhood,” Yoshiro said before taking a deep gulp of hot tea.

“He’s not a God,” Iron Cross replied, he was a devout Christian and was somewhat uncomfortable with the idea.
“Call him what you want, when someone says the word ‘God’, the first image that comes to my mind is his face. And yet you are right, for he’s not a God as Gods are perfect. He unfortunately is entirely human in that regard, and cannot possibly be expected to be a perfect angel all the time. You say he’s been late to disasters and that he’s neglecting his duty but I say that perhaps his inner human weakness has finally shown itself. There came a time when I realized I couldn’t keep it up forever, and though your immortality or whatever it is that keeps you so damn young has allowed you to continue without reaching that point yet, I’m sure at some point you’ll realize that you won’t be able to do it forever either. It’s not a matter of physical weariness… why I can still do everything I could do when I was twenty years younger, but I know I can’t do it anymore because my spirit is no longer young. Mister Magnificent is despite appearances older than you or I, indeed he’s older than all but a tiny fraction of the world’s population. And though his body might be more powerful now than ever —indeed to me, at least, he’s always seemed to get stronger as time goes by— his spirit must be exhausted, his mind tired from years of activity. Yes there’s no physical exhaustion. But that just isn’t enough for a man, a man needs rest from his work, and he’s never gotten that.”

“So you think that he’s going through some sort of crisis?” Iron Cross asked.
“If crisis is the word you feel appropriate to use then use it, I would prefer the word struggle.” Yoshiro said solemnly, looking at the reflection of his face in the still tea.
“Struggle?” Iron Cross asked dumbfounded. He took a seat on the bare floor next to Yoshiro and crossed his legs; he had to sit down to ponder what his friend had just told him, “You think what he’s going through is a struggle, a struggle with what?”
“Between his human morality and his inner Godhood no doubt. Can you honestly say that you’ve never once heard the voice?” Yoshiro asked.
“What voice?” Iron Cross didn’t know what he was referring to; in fact he was a little worried that he was going soft in the head with age.

“Don’t look at me like I’m crazy,” said Yoshiro, sensing the suspicion in his friend’s expression and voice, “Have you ever flown up to the clouds and looked down on the little people and their little houses and heard a voice in the back of your mind telling you that you’re greater than them, and that you deserve their worship?” His voice had shifted from the carefree intonation of an old man receiving the visit of an old friend to a grave tone of a man recounting a horrid memory.
“I have,” admitted Iron Cross, his head bowing in shame. He had indeed often thought of the absurdity of being reined in by human concerns, and found himself horrified by how close he was to resenting humanity and all of its little problems.
“Mister Magnificent no doubt does that every single waking moment of his life and with time I’m sure the voice has become stronger and more persuasive. How can human morality hope to reign in a force of nature like him?” Yoshiro then gave a strange unsettling laugh that was laden with amusement and discomfort, “Expecting him to obey the law is like trying to tell a bullet that killing is wrong, there’s no Earthly reason for him to obey the law or subside to human morality. The only thing that stands between him and us is his human heart, which time and the nature of the world around him has no doubt weakened. I don’t know if I believe in a God, but I know I’ll be praying to something should Mister Magnificent ever truly give in to that voice. I think we all will. Unfortunately I don’t truly think it’s if, I believe it’s a matter of when. Time can do strange things to people.”
“It sure can,” Agreed Iron Cross, his eyes staring blankly off into the distance, seeing through the paper walls and out into space.

Chapter 22: Lower Earth Orbit.

Of course the Polar-Man couldn’t hope to just blast off into the sky and into orbit like a cowboy on a runaway rocket, he was a thinking man and as such had thought of everything (at least he hoped he had thought of everything). He had taken the Orbital Vehicle and modified it (to sweeten the deal he would allow the Chinese to keep the now souped-up vehicle with the advanced tech he had applied to it) with a sort of cloaking field that bended both visible light and other EM waves including those emitted by Radar. He had a choice of co-pilot, the choice being Dragon or Jade Empress. The Polar-Man reflected that it was without a doubt the easiest decision he had ever made in his entire life regarding anything. Having an attractive woman is much preferable to a surly idiot who wants to kill you. The Polar-Man knew he had to pilot the craft carefully but it was difficult under the circumstances, he kept on staring at Jade Empress whenever she was looking the other way. Often though she would look back and glare at him for the unwanted attention he was giving her, the Polar-Man would always smile innocently and look away.

It was her fault though, the Polar-Man reasoned, if she had been more considerate she would have bundled up and left more to the imagination and less to the eye, that way he wouldn’t be so distracted and she wouldn’t feel so self-conscious about it. The small craft left the stratosphere less than a minute after taking off from its little base in the Gobi Desert, and soon it would be in outer space proper. Jade Empress had never been in space before, nor had the Polar-Man but neither of them demonstrated any excitement toward the prospect. It was all purely business.
“That uniform of yours,” the Polar-Man began after a few minutes of silence, “Do you put it on because your government tells you to?” He looked at his copilot with a supercilious smirk. She returned with a glare but said nothing, “It’s alright, say what you want, I won’t tell them,” But still she said nothing, “Because I can’t imagine why a woman like you, strong, confident, and independent would ever wear something so…” he smiled wickedly, “…brief.” His mechanical eye was studying every last detail of the interior of the vessel: controls, navigation, displays, welding, and of course Jade Empress too.

The eye was good at gathering information and could take hundreds of photographs per second and stitch them together to form a comprehensive blueprint of the vehicle. The idiotic Chinese had searched him for surveillance equipment or recording devices, blithely ignoring the fact that there was a camera installed into his face. Even if that weren’t the case the Polar-Man had an eidetic memory and could have reconstructed the craft by memory alone if necessary.
“Just fly,” Jade Empress said at last, “I just want to get this over with as quickly as possible.” Her words contained a venomous inflection, not quite aggressive but certainly standoffish. Perhaps standoffish isn’t the right word as that would imply there was no real reason for the behavior. She had a real reason to act this way, the Polar-Man was by all means a terrible excuse for a human being, and worst of all (in her mind) a misogynist who was up there with Schopenhauer.
“Ah there he is,” the Polar-Man said, gazing through the small glass window at the object they had come in search of. He was motionless and almost peaceful in his vacuum-induced tranquility but peaceful was never the right word when dealing with the likes of Demon, “Isn’t he beautiful?” the Polar-Man asked, his eyes swelling with admiration. Jade Empress cringed.

“A sunset is beautiful, that is an abomination,” Jade Empress said. The Polar-Man scoffed at this. There the creature sat, still and tranquil but still obviously god-like in his physical power and toughness. The vehicle approached closer and closer to him but still approaching cautiously. He may have appeared still and unconscious, dead even, but the Polar-Man knew that the thing was neither dead nor asleep, it was merely resting lightly.
“I’m not talking about aesthetics little girl, I’m talking about biological perfection. This “abomination” as you call him, is the perfect organism, one that has moved beyond the limitation of death. Look at him, he gets thrown into one of the most inhospitable environments there is and rather than die he simply goes to sleep. Well metabolic stasis to be more precise. But in either case surely you have to appreciate him on an intellectual level, I mean he’s unstoppable.”
“Hopefully he’s not as unstoppable as you seem to think he is. My superiors may think that it’s a good idea to release this beast and have him kill Mister Magnificent because they don’t know of a way to do it themselves but I’m forced to wonder what they intend to do about their ‘solution’ once the ‘problem’ is eradicated.” Jade Empress said.
“Perhaps they intend to clone Demon and force the two to fight one another for all time?” the Polar-Man suggested half-seriously.

“That’s ridiculous,” shot back Jade Empress, “Now on to more important things, how do you intend to get that thing in here?” Jade Empress asked obstinately. The Polar-Man just laughed.
“Not exactly the creative type, are you?” The Polar-Man smirked, “No my fair lady, we’re not taking that “thing” inside of this craft, what we are going to do is to decay its orbit and guide it’s resulting descent toward the Arctic Circle.”
“And how will that be accomplished?” Jade Empress asked.
“Simple, I get out and throw him at the Arctic Circle,” the Polar-Man replied. His tone was so matter of fact that it was as if he was speaking of something as mundane as pushing a car with an empty tank to a gas station.
“I don’t think we have a space suit here,” Jade Empress pointed out.
“Don’t need one, I’m more resilient to detritus and cosmic rays than any suit your ham-fisted engineers could come up with,” The Polar-Man said confidently.

“So the plan is for you to hold your breath then?” Jade Empress asked dryly. The Polar-Man laughed and shook his head.
“By not holding my breath in I’ll actually prevent certain injuries that may ensue from temporary exposure to the vacuum. Oh and the whole freezing myth is complete crap, I may get a slight sunburn though, you know how we English are.” He chuckled and Jade Empress couldn’t believe how blasé he was about what amounted to finding a sleeping monster, poking it with a stick and then setting it on a path of destruction that would hopefully result in the death of a person, and a hero at that. It made Jade Empress sick to her stomach, but she knew from her earlier encounter with Mister Magnificent that he was too great a danger to be handled with kid gloves.

“Aren’t you worried that the monster’s descent is going to be detected?” Jade Empress asked.
“I took the liberty of falsifying reports of an incoming meteorite that would be splashing down over the Arctic Circle and submitting them to some major civilian and military astronomical agencies under a pseudonym. It’s all part of an elaborate charade I’ve been keeping for the last few months in preparation for such occurrences. I’ve even corroborated the reports with testimony from several other trusted scientific figures, all of them me of course, but under different names. You’d be surprised how many scientific experts quoted in major magazines are really just me under a different identity,” The Polar-Man stated proudly.
“My, you thought of everything,” Jade Empress said sarcastically, not in the least bit impressed by his smugness.
“My good woman, you have no idea,” The Polar-Man replied, evidently he was unaware that she wasn’t speaking in earnest.

... but wouldn't Demon make a rather large crater in the artic circle? Anyways that was really good, but from the last comments from the polar-man, i now wonder if he knows about paragon and jade emperess.

I never thought about it before but yeah I guess it could be taken that he was referring to their relationship but he was really just posturing. He does know though, there's few things he doesn't know. See from the beginning I set him up as a sort of evil-Odin. A one-eyed watcher who sees everything but instead of acting benevolently he act malevolently. You might even say that the solution that gave him his power is similar to the well of wisdom Odin drank from, and sacrificed an eye for. Of course in Talbot's case the eye wasn't given willingly

Chapter 23: Idaho.

“What’s this all about, Sawyer?” Paragon asked, leaning against an old hay loft and hoping that his new shirt didn’t get scratched or torn by the splintered wood. The area was flat and the primary color was brown, varying shades of brown from the ground to the grass and to the tired sky. Off in the distance lay the gray shades of far mountains, but otherwise the land was flat and without much detail. It was empty though, that’s all that mattered.
“Well for one thing, I felt that having this conversation at a duck pond would be a little cliché,” the other man said with a wry grin.
“Cut the bullshit,” Paragon said tersely.

“Right, sorry,” Special Agent Sawyer, first name unknown to anyone outside the upper echelons of the intelligence community had been the government envoy to Deterrence for the last ten years. He was the textbook “spook”, an average sized Caucasian male with light reddish-brown hair and clad in a black and white suit and wearing reflective sunglasses. He had begun as a young man fresh from whatever academy he had come from (it was hard to say as he never told anyone exactly what agency he was a part of) and at this point had become well acquainted with all of Deterrence’s members, “Let me start out by saying how sorry I am about the losses of your team-mates,” Sawyer offered his ‘sincere’ condolences to the on edge hero, knowing that it wouldn’t matter one way or another to him.
“If you had really cared about them you would have listened to them when they told you about the threat that the Legion posed instead of slamming a muzzle on us and telling us to scout Chinese Forces in the Pacific rather than making sure that the American people were safe,” Paragon said angrily, poking Sawyer in the chest as he spoke each word.
“Hey easy there, Ted,” Sawyer grabbed Paragon’s hand to stop the poking, “I’ll admit that there were mistakes made,” he began, releasing Paragon’s hand.

“Mistakes? A mistake is forgetting a kid’s birthday cake, a mistake is leaving the candles on in your bathroom, what happened was not a mistake! It was a colossal failure on your part to act on intelligence we had gathered through months of infiltration of the most powerful terrorist organization in history!” Paragon was just about yelling at the top of his lungs.
“Look, we got the job done didn’t we?” Sawyer asked.
“Don’t give me anymore ‘we’ bullshit, Sawyer!” Paragon yelled.
“You want to know the reason I asked you here, or do you want to keep yelling at me until you lose your voice?” Sawyer asked, dipping his sunglasses low to show Paragon his strange hetero-chromic eyes. One of them was blue, the other was brown.

“Fine, go, tell me,” Paragon said, crossing his arms in frustration and impatience. He had his reasons for hating Agent Sawyer, not least of which was what (at least to Paragon) was his extreme incompetence.
“It’s about Mister Magnificent, he’s been acting up lately,” Sawyer said.
“And what, you want me to try and arrest him?” Paragon asked.
“No, I want you to give him room, that’s an order directly from Washington. I don’t need to tell you that he’s an American icon, he’s like the flag. So what I’m asking you to do is to clean up his messes,” Sawyer said, lowering his glasses once more, “And I’m going to ask you not to make mountains out of molehills,” Paragon couldn’t believe what he was hearing, not even Agent Sawyer would be dumb enough to still care about the nation’s image when so much was at stake.
“You’re asking me to pretend that nothing’s wrong?” Paragon asked bewildered, “Just so the American Government doesn’t look bad?”

“Essentially yes, it’s not like it’s unprecedented,” Sawyer said.
“Mister Magnificent losing control is unprecedented!” Paragon shouted.
“Hey, do you want the farmers to hear?” Sawyer asked, “Keep your voice down.”
“I’ve had just about enough of all your bullshit Sawyer; I’ve had just about enough of your boss’s bullshit!” Paragon raised his voice further.
“Then quit, what’s stopping you?” Sawyer asked.
“The same thing that’s stopping me from ripping the iron out of your blood-stream, or just going old-fashioned and strangling you,” Paragon said icily.

“Like the Law ever stopped your kind from doing what they want. Look, you can try to stop Mister Magnificent, but we both know it won’t work. If you do it my way, at least then people won’t start panicking.”
“Has it ever occurred to you or your boss that maybe people are better off panicked than ignorant?” Paragon asked.
“Keeping people ignorant is pretty much the reason my department exists,” Sawyer replied, “This country has lasted this long because its people are ignorant of what’s really going on, at what point did you forget that?”

Chapter 24: The Northern Atlantic Ocean.

When he closed his eyes and filtered out all the sounds and cacophonous noises that bombarded his hyper-sensitive ears every waking second of his life, Mister Magnificent could hear some incredible things. He found that with an immense amount of practice and meditation it was possible for him to tune out most every noise and focus on a single sound, otherwise conversation would be impossible. It wasn’t always that way, his super-hearing as it was called erroneously by the media developed like his other powers: over time. Originally he could only hear like any normal human could but in time he found that he had ears like a bat, and in time it grew to truly super-natural levels. This hearing was limited by the fact that the sound waves were always just ‘ghosts’, that is to say that the sound of a gunshot from several miles away would only reach his ears after the bullet had left the barrel and was well on its way to its target. Mister Magnificent compensated for this by being practically as fast as the speed of thought.

There was once a famous math problem that asked such a question: if Mister Magnificent is standing three miles away from a gunman, and the gunman is standing a mile from his target, and assuming instant reaction time on Mister Magnificent’s part, will Mister Magnificent get to the target in time to save him/her. The problem with this was that no one truly knew how fast Mister Magnificent could fly, but they always assumed that it was “something lower than the speed of light”. In this case the issue wasn’t Mister Magnificent’s speed, but if the sound would travel fast enough to reach him in time. The problem was unsolvable because some necessary information was left out: namely the muzzle velocity of the bullet in question. Still most people simply guessed and said that Mister Magnificent could save the target, simply by virtue of him being Mister Magnificent.

Right now Mister Magnificent was hovering over the cold waters of the North Atlantic, opening his hearing to all the sounds around him, the sound of the wind, the rain, the churning waters below, and far off in the distance the sounds of seabirds diving for fish. There was no one within ten miles of him, no ships or planes to see him, but if there had been it would have been quite a sight. He had stopped holding in his aura, an exercise that took much concentration and focus, and as such was glowing like a light house, a blue lantern hovering a dozen yards above the ocean surface. The air around him was ionized among other more exotic effects, and the water below swirled and spun like a maelstrom. The crackling plasma, or whatever it was (it demonstrated qualities that would have made a great and esoterically focused scientist like the Polar-Man scratch his head in confusion) had returned in even greater force and any ship that came within twenty miles of him found their compasses and all other navigation equipment going haywire. He had in effect become a one-man Bermuda Triangle.

Water from the maelstrom below him began to evaporate as the swirling torrent below him climbed from ice cold to boiling. The cold rain that entered into his convection zone was immediately and instantly evaporated and sizzled like grease hitting a hot pan. Had he looked up he would have seen that the clouds were swirling too. The vortex was growing larger by the second, Mister Magnificent knew that in a few hours it would be too massive to be ignored, and it would begin to pull ships in from miles away. What frightened him more than anything was how little he cared, he found himself unable to come up with any good reason why he should do a thing to stop it.
‘But think of all the people who could get hurt,’ a voice said.

‘Who cares?’ asked another voice. The first voice couldn’t answer; it didn’t have the strength anymore. There was a fireball that had penetrated the stormy gray skies, its descent was nearly horizontal, and Mister Magnificent followed it with his eyes until it fell out of sight and out of his concern.

Chapters 23 and 24 are both sort of filler chapters that I put in to break up the action but I think they have their merits nonetheless.

Yes they deffinately have their merrits! They confirm the troubles Misret Magnificent is going though and also clarified the "voices in his head" theory.

Yeah I like the idea that Rising Sun's mortality and approaching end gives him a more clear understanding of human nature than his peers.

Chapter 25: Los Angeles.

“Should you really be doing this?” Bombshell asked, looking at Avenger’s leg for lingering signs of injury. Avenger’s leg looked fine but that didn’t mean that it was okay for her to be sparring with it. In response Avenger used her ‘injured leg’ to deliver a crushing kick to Bombshell’s abdominals. The kick was of sufficient strength to knock Bombshell off her feet and onto her back a yard away.
“Feels fine to me, how about you?” Avenger asked with a wicked smile. Avenger wasn’t wearing her costume; she was wearing sweat pants and a t-shirt that was intended for a man but still showed off her assets. She was too large to wear women’s clothing most of the time and she preferred men’s clothes anyhow. Her face was by no means ugly, but at the same time it wasn’t beautiful, at least not like Bombshell’s.

“You hate me don’t you?” Bombshell asked, clutching her stomach with both hands in a vain effort to stop the pain. There was a clearly visible reddish footprint corresponding with the area that Avenger kicked.
“Call it tough love,” said Avenger, “If I had been wearing my heels at the time you’d be trying to keep your intestines from falling out. Now come on, try and hit me, I’m sick of fights that end in less than a minute with you fretting over little bruises on that cute ass of yours.” She held her hand out and gestured for Bombshell to come at her.
“Sometimes I wonder why I deal with this,” Bombshell said morosely.

“You’re the one who wanted me as a teacher, you kept on saying how you needed to be taught how to fight, and how I was the best teacher you could think of,” Avenger anticipated a left feint and blocked Bombshell’s next attack, aside from her obvious advantages in strength, speed, and experience Avenger had two serious advantages over Bombshell that made their sparring matches incredibly one sided. She had a sizeable advantage in reach, standing more than half a foot taller than Bombshell and was a lot meaner with her attacks. When Bombshell had first began to train with her she went easy on her, or at least as easy as Avenger could go on someone, but at this point she held little back. One of Avengers biggest shortcomings was her seeming inability to treat a fight with common thugs any differently than a fight with super powered foes like Dragon. One of the reasons criminals in Los Angeles hated her so much was that while she only seldom killed someone (usually by accident, usually) there was nary a criminal she encountered that didn’t have some injury to show for it (be it physical, psychological, or both).

Avenger also made a habit of trying to break wrists whenever possible when it came to criminals who had threatened her with a gun, that way there was less chance that they’d be able to do it again. In some hang-outs (“bad-guy bars” as Avenger called them) criminals would swap Avenger stories and show each other injuries, “So now after all the time and effort I’ve put into making you a world class fighter you’re just gonna bail on me because the pain’s too much for you? Puhh-lease.” She picked Bombshell up by her right leg and her left shoulder and tossed Bombshell down onto the hard but safe exercise mat.

“I’m not quitting,” Bombshell said angrily, “But could you take it easy? I’m not Dragon; you don’t have to go all out.”
“You know it’s hard for me, holding back. When I trained Paragon in hand to hand he complained just like you did, I would just keep telling him, ‘it’s only a broken collar-bone’, or time heals all lesions. But still he kept complaining,” Avenger adroitly dodged a low kick and returned the favor with a punch to Bombshell’s stomach. Bombshell collapsed at that point, the wind having been knocked out of her lungs and her stomach felt like it was about to rupture. Avenger always hit her in the stomach because she knew how important Bombshell’s face was to her, plus she didn’t like “destroying something beautiful” as she always said. Bombshell appreciated the thought but took little solace in it, her stomach at this point felt like tenderized meat.

“You know if you’re still not sure why Paragon dumped your surly ass, I think I might be able to fill you in,” Bombshell teased, trying to replace the breath that had been knocked out of her lungs by the last attack.
“Okay first off, I broke it off with him, no matter what he tells you. And second off I think we need to call it a day.” Appearances aside Avenger did care about Bombshell.
“No I’m fine,” Bombshell tried to get up but fell back onto her hands and coughed weakly. Saliva mixed with blood stained the mat and dripped on her exercise shirt.
“I appreciate your dedication, and I’m proud to have been proven wrong, but coughing out blood is the universal sign for ‘I’ve had enough’,” Avenger said amusedly. Bombshell was apparently unconscious, too exhausted and injured to keep her eyes open any longer, “Sleeping like a little Baby,” Avenger said, almost gushing with affection at the sight of the unconscious Bombshell.

“Such motherly tenderness,” Paragon had arrived without alerting Avenger to his presence, something that few people could accomplish, “Is she alright?” Paragon stood over Bombshell, evidently to check whether she was still alive. He could never be sure with the people Avenger “KO’ed”.
“Yeah, she’s fine, just taking a sparring-nap,” Avenger stroked the unconscious Bombshell’s silky locks with affection, “So judging from your civilian clothes and the fact that you’re here right now, you want to relive old times and go a few rounds,” Avenger said eager for the opportunity to knock Paragon senseless. She got into a boxing stance and started performing the ‘rope-a-dope’.

“There are few people who spar with you once that are suicidal enough to do it again, I for one am glad not to be counted among them.” Paragon responded with satisfaction.
“Then why are you here, big guy?” Avenger asked, putting her muscular arms around Paragon and pulling him closer to her sweating body, “Come to relive the other old times?” she asked tongue-in-cheek. She loved making Paragon uncomfortable, and nothing made him more uncomfortable than being near her while she was hot and sweaty. The ‘big-guy’ bit was also in jest, her being ten pounds heavier and five inches taller than he was.
“Please let go, this a new shirt,” Paragon said flatly, he had to ask since he wasn’t strong enough to push her off physically and she wasn’t wearing anything metal. He didn’t want to risk hitting her with one of his shields: that could escalate quickly.

“Alright,” Avenger relented, releasing Paragon from her embrace and walking toward Bombshell, “Tell me why you’re here then?”
“I just got back from Idaho, I was asked to meet with Agent Sawyer.” Paragon said knowing what Avenger’s reaction would be.

“Sawyer— you just talked with Agent Sawyer? And you didn’t knock his teeth out?” Avenger would never forgive Sawyer for ignoring the vital intelligence she had worked hard to uncover as a mole in the Legion. She had done some things she wasn’t proud of, and she had also done things she really wasn’t proud of.
“There’s a reason he asked to speak with me, you’d try to kill him. But I’m a “nice-guy”, sometimes I wish I weren’t, but I Am.”
“Why don’t you be a “nice-guy” and help a lady carry goldilocks to a bed where she can rest?” Avenger asked stooping over to pick Bombshell up.

“The only lady here is Bombshell,” Paragon said, “Ladies tend to be demure and polite, I’m not sure what category you fall into Lorena, but it surely isn’t ‘lady’.” He stooped down and draped Bombshell’s right arm over his neck while Avenger did the same with Bombshell’s left arm.
“I love it when you grow a spine, Paragon,” Avenger said, grinning wolfishly.

From the journal of Sir John Talbot:

June 3rd, 1994:
“I’m not too worried about the divorce, I don’t blame Catherine, rather I’m looking forward to being free again, she can take what she wants of my inheritance from my dear, late father and she can take the house, I just want it to be over with. Still, I wish I could see the look on her solicitor’s face when he discovers I’ve gone off and agreed to allow her to take one-half of everything, I daresay the little rosy-cheeked imp will be a bit disappointed to find that I’ve capitulated so easily. I’m putting it all behind me and I’m to set off for the Arctic Circle tomorrow for a sort of soul searching journey that I hope will tell me what I need to know about my future, about my destiny.”
June 13th, 1994:
“I was still in bed when the ship arrived in port, the sound of the horn going off to announce our arrival made me jump out of bed and smack my head on a steel bulk-head. The imprint I caused on the metal was marvelous.”
July 1st, 1994:
“I know what they’re thinking. They think I’m unhinged, that I’m mad, but they don’t understand. When I tell them I feel like taking a stroll in the snow-kissed landscape before me they look at me dumbfounded. The cold doesn’t penetrate my skin like it does the others, oh I feel the cold but it does no harm to me, it doesn’t chill my bones. My skin is rather resistant to any sort of transfer of heat and/or energy, perhaps that is one of the reasons why I need so little sustenance and sleep to survive, perhaps I don’t lose energy and recycle it in some form or another. Already this journey has cleared my mind.”
July 17th, 1994:
“I am reborn once more. This rebirth is by no means physical however, this is a spiritual rebirth. I have discovered my purpose in life; standing upon the ceiling of the world I have discovered my destiny. Naked as I was when I emerged into the world, I stood upon a hill, the snow and ice blowing into my face and embracing me with its primal fury, and I looked upon the domain that was now mine and mine alone. The wind, snow, and ice have no master. Such is a state I shall aspire to. I shall be my own master, and never allow anyone to make it otherwise.”
July 21st, 1994:
“I’ll build it with my own hands if necessary. I’ve found the perfect rock to build my church upon, so to speak. It lays hundreds of miles away from civilization and stands alone, a great and majestic granite slab embedded into an equally impressive glacier of immensurate size. I shall build my new home here.”
July 22nd, 1994:
“I have just received terrible news, my mother died. Apparently her passing came just as I arrived in the Arctic-Circle. It’s a shame, not simply because I will miss her, but because it means I must return to England. I have begun to dig out the foundation, with my own hands out of the granite. I will return as soon as my business in England is concluded. I’ve thought of a new name that goes well with my new residence: “The Polar-Man”. Admittedly kitschy, but still I believe there is some substance to it. And if anyone mocks me for it… well I do have super-strength.”

that was really good! i like how you added someone who works for the government into the story and how you began to explain how the former team-mates had died. I had almost forgot about them. are they of any further importance or were they just mencioned to help the reader understand about the governments controll over the superheros?

One of my regrets is that I pretty much ignore them for the rest of the story and aside from the funeral the teammates get over their loss pretty quickly. This isn't very important in this story but in the sequel I'm working on it becomes one of the major core elements of the story. I never liked the idea of superheroes being their own entities, naturally superbeings would be treated as any other natural resource: a government tool. For instance in our justice system Batman would be a criminal and he'd have to either become deputized or be a fugitive.

Chapter 26: The Arctic-Circle.

Demon lay sprawled out on the ice like a newborn left to die on a mountain because of some birth defect. Yet such a fate as death would most likely never come to Demon, he was of sturdier stuff. The Polar-Man’s aim had been impeccable; he had tossed the creature to a landing point less than two miles from his fortress. The intense heat that had blasted his body as he went into reentry was fading in the arctic cold. Ice was forming on his skin just as he was waking; the wasteland was trying to claim him, to devour him with its cold embrace.

Demon paid no heed to the ice, when he opened his eyes for the first time after his long sleep he searched for something to destroy, something among the ice. There was only rage: rage and pain. That was all that Demon could still comprehend. You could call him animalistic, but that would be an insult to animals, as even the most ferocious of animals have some constructive qualities. Demon existed solely to destroy, and if he ran out of living, moving things to destroy he would attack the non-living facets of his surroundings. This is precisely what he did in this case: robbed of living quarry as he was Demon turned to bashing the ground he stood upon and thrashing at the very wind that blew snow and ice crystals into his shrunken black eyes.

Bestial roars and sickening gurgles resounded across the snowy plains accompanied by the chorus of whistling winds. It was his mad assault on the landscape that made it easy for the Polar-Man and Jade Empress to find him. The pair stood on a small hill a safe distance (safe being a relative term here) from where Demon was, observing him for some time and debating the right move to make. Jade Empress suggested a head-on approach but the Polar-Man was quick to tell her that would be unwise.

“Demon’s strength tends to fluctuate over time,” he said, “I believe he gains strength when exposed to new forms of energy and radiation, absorbing it like a sponge. He was outside of the magnetosphere for a while, there’s no telling what exotic cosmic radiation he may have absorbed.” The Polar-Man got a closer look with his mechanical eye, zooming in so that he could see the details of Demon’s horrifying visage.
“So then what’s the plan?” Jade Empress asked, doubting that the Polar-Man could think of a better idea.
“Give me a moment,” The Polar-Man scanned Demon’s body, searching for any weaknesses inherent in his physiology, “Well I’ve got nothing,” He said at last. Jade Empress couldn’t believe it; she gave him a hard backhand slap across the face that would have taken his head off if he was a normal man.
“For all your so called intelligence you can’t think of anything?” She fumed at him. There was a red mark on his face but he took it in stride, surprisingly.

“Keep your voice down, he’ll hear us, then we won’t have a choice but to go through with your plan to attack him head-on,” the Polar-Man noticed Jade Empress now had a panicked look on her face which could only mean one thing. He turned around just in time to see Demon’s pumpkin-sized red fist close the distance and connect with the Polar-Man’s face. In an instant his prosthetic eye was crushed and disabled, giving the Polar-Man a serious blindspot that allowed Demon to rain in several furious blows to the Polar-Man’s chest and face. If Jade Empress hadn’t been on the spot there’s a chance Demon would have had him and it would be all over for the Polar-Man. Indeed a large part of Jade Empress wanted to let Demon have him but she knew what her duty was.

Quicker than Demon could react Jade Empress blitzed the monster, throwing him off the Polar-Man and tossing him head-first into a snowdrift several hundred yards away.
“Still think he’s beautiful?” Jade Empress asked, smirking at the cuts and bruises on the Polar-Man’s face.
“I’m thinking he’s perfect for the task at hand,” the Polar-Man replied, ignoring Jade Empress’s denigrating stance and attitude and focusing on the angrier than ever monster that was shaking the snow off and making a rush at the pair. For his size he was unbelievable agile and could close the hundreds of yards distance in under five seconds.
“On two,” Jade Empress readied herself, “One. Two!” Both Jade Empress and the Polar-Man sprung at Demon and met his charge half-way. The combined force of both superhumans stopped his assault and forced him back into the ground.

The shockwave that resulted blew snow in every direction and shattered ice, somewhere in the distance an ice cave collapsed but the combatants could not be bothered to notice. Jade Empress had fought Demon before in the aforementioned incident in China but he seemed to be stronger now than he was even then when he was able to take on the combined assaults of Dragon, Jade Empress, and all the other Chinese superhumans. As Demon knocked the Polar-Man aside and grabbed her by her hair she found herself ironically wishing that Mister Magnificent would come like he did last time, only to realize that getting rid of him was the reason they had brought Demon down to Earth in the first place. She pulled away, kicking hard with both legs into Demon’s chest.

She felt her legs sink deep into his spongy but indestructible flesh, the sensation made her feel like vomiting but she pulled through and pushed herself out of Demon’s grasp, and as she did a lock of her ebony hair was torn off by Demon but she kept fighting: ignoring the pain and focusing on bringing Demon down. The Polar-Man had used the time to recover and when Jade Empress had gotten out of Demon’s grip he threw himself onto the monster’s back, wrapping his arms around the overgrown beast’s neck and pulling with all his strength. Demon’s shoulders were like a gorilla’s: too massive to allow full motion so as long as the Polar-Man kept relatively mobile and bobbed around Demon would be unable to swat him off. Jade Empress attacked every point she could think of, from the face to the elbows, to the groin. She found that Demon was more or less uniformly invulnerable and what’s more didn’t seem to feel pain.

Or at least no more pain than the constant pain of simply living as he was. No doubt Demon sought death, unfortunate considering his toughness and immortality. But death wasn’t what Jade Empress and the Polar-Man wished for; they simply wanted to knock him out, to restrain him and to make him more manageable. After some effort Demon’s clawed hands found their way to the Polar-Man and soon after the villain was flung straight into Jade Empress. The Polar-Man’s head found its way into Jade Empress’s stomach, knocking Jade Empress’s wind out of her. Demon was quick to take advantage of them, grabbing both of them and knocking their heads together not once, not twice, but three times. Jade Empress managed to wriggle her way out of his grip before Demon could slam their heads again and put all of her might into a single punch aimed at the small space between Demon’s beady black eyes. Two things happened: firstly Demon got knocked back over a hundred yards and secondly Jade Empress felt like she needed a new right hand. She rubbed her wrist, wincing and noting how quickly her hand had gone red and had begun to throb.

She made several lightning fast glances, surveying the area around her in search of the Polar-Man, but to her horror he was nowhere to be found, he had abandoned her and left her alone with Demon. Had this been his plan from the beginning? Surely she had never done anything to him to warrant this, had she? Her disquiet thoughts were interrupted by the sharp sting of a set of claws ripping through her back side, taking blood, skin, and flesh away and leaving pain in their stead. She jumped out of the way before the claws could hit her again, intending to escape by flying away ‘To hell with the mission!’ she thought to herself. But as her feet left the snow and she felt the wind rustling against her body as she took off Demon’s massive paw caught her left foot and squeezed it with all his might before slamming her face-first into the snow-topped icescape. Jade Empress was feeling a bit punch-drunk at this point and her throbbing hand was now the least of her concerns, her priorities were simple: she needed to survive, everything else was secondary.

The worst part of the whole mess was that Demon didn’t seem any worse for the wear, if anything all the scrapping had served to fully wake him and bring him to total alacrity, as his reflexes were quicker now than when the fight started as evidenced by the fact he was able to block all of Jade Empress’s attacks and return the favor with sickening fervor. For a short time, a fleeting moment, Jade Empress thought she was going to die, ripped apart and crushed by Demon. Her corpse would be forgotten, lost and buried under tons of snow and ice. But that thankfully did not come to pass. Demon was frozen in place by some device the Polar-Man had retrieved from his fortress.

“Good job distracting him,” the Polar-Man said, his face bedecked with a triumphant and wide grin.
“Where the hell did you go?” Jade Empress tried to ask the question but was unable to. She was on the verge of collapse, her chest was heaving, her hair was disheveled and covered in snow, her backside was stinging from the clawing, and she could no longer manage to converse with the Polar-Man in English, all she could manage was broken Mandarin. Demon was unable to move, but he was still conscious, and his gaze was fixed in place, staring at Jade Empress as if she were the only other thing in the universe that mattered. Every single brain cell in his degenerated brain was devoted to one task: killing Jade Empress. Demon hated unfinished business. Jade Empress was on her hands and knees and said limbs and appendages were wobbling and giving in. After some time she collapsed and the Polar-Man descended on her.

WHat did the polar-man use on Demon? and will he fix his eye?

You'll see soon enough.

Chapter 27: Beijing.

The General Secretary was a small, quiet man who liked to keep his office orderly and neat and spent much of his time dedicated to this ideal. His hair was thinning at the top and he had a wispy black moustache. He was short but not to the point where it became immediately obvious. His office was without a doubt the neatest in an entire nation of over a billion people. Papers (if they were on his desk at all and not filed away neatly into cabinets) were always stacked up and arranged by order of urgency and importance. As the Head of the Party, Meng Kai-Peng was in theory the most powerful man in China but as is always the case with politics the theory was not quite the reality. His predecessor had occupied the joint positions of both General Secretary and President and as such had little challenge to his rule; Meng wasn’t a strong man however and as such could be taken advantage of.

One of his greatest fears was a coup which he felt was not a question of if but when. His friend General Tung decided to pay him a visit while he was busy shuffling papers and organizing paper clips according to color a task he considered important. The door to his office opened, even though he had asked for no interruptions, and he looked up to see the stern and bulldog-like face of General Tung. Strangely enough the appearance of the intimidating man was what Meng needed to put a smile on his face.
“I’m guessing that you didn’t bother going through my secretary?” Meng asked, forgetting his compulsive need to reorder his office for a moment.

“She wasn’t paying attention; she was filling her nails I think. She didn’t even notice the sound of boots and the sound of the door opening and closing. I simply walked past her like I owned the place; it’s the same strategy I use to get into secret off-limits areas. When people tell me I don’t have clearance I just keep on driving and hope they open the fence up, same here,” Tung’s delivery was incredibly matter-of-fact.
“One of these days, your luck will run out and some jumpy gate guard will put a bullet in you,” Meng said with a thick smile.

“It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been shot,” Tung commented.
“So what are you here for? Not that I’m complaining, it’s just you should have phoned in that you were coming so I could clear my schedule,” He hadn’t seen Tung in a while and wanted to catch up with him.
“I’m afraid the reason I didn’t call in first is that I don’t have much time, there are things I have to prepare for, some delicate matters,” Tung was standing at attention as he always did when in the presence of a superior officer or a man of higher political rank like Meng.
“Perhaps you should sit down and tell me what matters you’re speaking of,” Meng suggested, gesturing to a seat that was tucked away in a corner.

“Thank you, no, I prefer to stand,” Tung said, waving his hand in polite refusal.
“This is about the deal you helped broker in Babu…, whatever that place is called, isn’t it?” Meng fumbled with the name Babushkin.
“Babushkin,” said Tung, “And yes it is,” Tung nodded.
“You know I ordered that meeting, don’t you?” Meng asked, understanding that Tung had to have known that.
“That’s precisely the reason I’m here, I want you to remand the decision,” Tung said.
“You’re worried about the Polar-Man, I understand,” Meng tried to sound thoughtful.
“But you don’t understand. If you understood you would have never agreed to this. The Polar-Man is a snake, and you’re attempting to put him in your pocket, to use him like you would any other tool. But you can’t put a snake like him in your pocket and hope that he won’t bite you in the ass.”

“What would you have me do?” Meng raised his voice, “I’ve seen enough reports to know that Mister Magnificent is losing it and even a child could see that such a thing is tantamount to the end of the world, unless we do something about him,” Meng said forcefully.
“And of course it doesn’t hurt that you’ll also deprive America of their greatest weapon. Admit it, if this were Dragon we were speaking of you wouldn’t overlook a single possible alternative to termination. I’m sure the Americans are trying everything they can think of. When and if we’re able to take Mister Magnificent down the Americans will be vulnerable. And America hates feeling vulnerable.” Tung said.

“What do you think will happen then?” Meng was worried where he was going with this.
“I think they’ll try to compensate for their vulnerability by destroying the biggest threat to their security: us. They’ll find a way to trace Mister Magnificent’s death to us, no matter how flimsy or ridiculous the thread is they’ll pin it on us and destroy us, probably not in that order though.”
“Then what are you advocating?”
“Either we stop this plan and let the Americans handle their own mess—”
“Their own mess? Mister Magnificent is a threat to the world, not just America!” Meng shouted.
“—or…” Tung continued, ignoring the interruption, “…we make the first strike and safeguard our nation from their aggression.” Meng couldn’t believe what Tung just said.

“Are you insane? How do you know the Americans don’t have my office bugged?” Meng asked indignantly, getting up from his chair and getting red in the face.
“If they are listening then I suggest they listen closely, because I won’t be involved when your little scheme blows up in your face and the Polar-Man betrays you. This is my resignation, Kai-Peng.” He stood stoic and grimfaced, a marked contrast to the perturbed and livid General Secretary.
“Your resignation?” He was stunned. As the words sunk in the General Secretary collapsed into his chair.
“Unless of course you’re prepared to do the right thing and listen to my advice,” Tung awaited Meng’s response.
“Who the hell do you think you are making demands of me?” Meng was saddened greatly by Tung’s attitude and words but decided to instead express himself with rage and indignation.

“Don’t do this Kai-Peng,” Tung said, disappointed at his old friend’s reaction.
“You don’t tell me what I can’t and won’t do! Get the hell out of my office! You want to resign? To hell with that, I’ll discharge you from the military!” He was jumping up and down and shouting with such fury that his secretary finally looked up from whatever she was doing and called security. Tung was idiosyncratically calm throughout it all. He gave a brief salute before leaving. He was out of the office before security could arrive, though he did pass by the men who were sent to apprehend him. They didn’t know who they were supposed to nab and when they saw the hero of Babushkin walk past they all stood at attention and saluted.

Well atleast someone thought of the Americans reaction to the death of Mister Magnificent's death. I was worried that you wouldn't add that in, though I am a bit dissapointed that General Tung was dischargd. Though, I guess that will only allow him to move more freely and do what he wants. I wonder if he will try to take his troops with him, or will they leave him. I mean to say that he has shown them much kindness and generosity.

My idea is that somewhere down the line, in a sequel there will be a coup d'etat in China and Tung will be put in charge but right now its just an idea. I like Tung because while he's a very flawed character (he basically just called for the complete premptive annihilation of America because of his us-or-them mentality) he's really a good man at heart who wants what's best for his country and is ready to resign on principle alone.

Here's another short one:

Chapter 28: Los Angeles.

Bombshell lived in one of the smaller apartments in the West Side of Los Angeles, in a neighborhood that bordered Beverley Hills but wasn’t actually part of the famous city due to some zoning issues. Her boyfriend, Jeff Agnew had been living with her for some time now and had become used to things like her having serious cuts and bruises, yet he wasn’t quite used to having her show up on the doorstep unconscious, being held by a man Jeff had never seen before.
“Uhh, are you a friend of Michelle?” Jeff asked. He was getting an odd feeling from the man, not a bad feeling but an odd one.

“Sure, you could say that, now where can I set her down, she needs some rest,” The man smiled.
“You can set her down on that couch over there,” Jeff said without taking his eyes off the man, simply pointing in the general direction of the sofa, “What can I call you?”
“Just call me Paragon,” the man said.
“Oh, I don’t suppose there’s a chance that there are two Paragons is there?” Jeff asked. He knew Paragon by the helmet, and the man was without a helmet or any identifying clothes, he was wearing civilian clothing. Paragon looked Jeff over and sized him up. Jeff was what could be called svelte and had a smooth chin that seemingly had yet to grow stubble, despite the fact he was around twenty-five years old.

“If there is I haven’t heard of him,” Paragon said with a smile. He set the unconscious Bombshell down easily and gently on the yellow felt sofa.
“What happened to her?” Jeff asked, “Did she get attacked by ninjas or aliens or something like that?” He had heard some pretty strange stories before, being the boyfriend of a superhero.
“Nothing that exotic,” Paragon chuckled, “She was just in a training session with Avenger and took one too many hits to the stomach,” as he spoke the still unconscious Bombshell coughed.
“Is that blood?” Jeff asked, pointing nervously at the red liquid that was now on the sofa.
“Yeah, nothing to worry about but if I were you I’d get some club soda before that sets in,” Paragon was being absurdly calm about it all but that was from experience. The worst injury he had ever sustained was a severed arm courtesy of the late super-criminal Ice-blade. He got better. In comparison Bombshell’s injuries were simple “boo-boos” that could be cured with a few hours of rest.

“This sort of thing happen to you guys all the time?” Jeff asked.
“It happens to her all the time, a long time ago I learned to never train with Avenger again and since then my time spent in intensive care has gone down considerably,” Paragon said, patting the unconscious Bombshell on the head.
“So Avenger’s that kind of girl?” Jeff asked.
“I doubt it, whatever ‘that kind of girl’ is it probably doesn’t go close to far enough to describe what sort of person Avenger is,” Paragon shrugged.
“So she’s a total bitch then?” Jeff asked. Paragon gave Jeff a hard stare.
“Shhh…” Paragon leaned in close to Jeff, “You could call her that, just not to her face, and never to mine.”
“Sorry,” Jeff said.

“It’s alright; just try to be more mindful next time. You never know when she might be lurking and waiting in the shadows,” Paragon patted Jeff on the shoulder, surprising the young man with the strength of hands.
“So she’ll be fine, then?” Jeff asked as Paragon was leaving.
“As long as she gets her rest, yes.”
“Hey wait, I’ve seen your face.” Jeff said, grabbing Paragon by the shoulder as he opened the door.
“Yes, and?”
“Well aren’t you worried that your secret identity is threatened now?”
“Kid, my secret identity is a nobody who lives in Lakeside Chicago. I don’t think I’m in any danger from you knowing my face.”

That was good. Is this Jeff going to tell anyone about Peragon? And what happens if he breaks up with Bombshell? Would he spill the secreat identity of Peragon to the Polar-man in spite? And seen as the Polar-man wanted to know his secreat identity, would he go to such extreams as to track down Jeff and interagate him?

Like Paragon said his identity doesn't really matter. It's like in Frisky Dingo where Awesome X is fretting over his secret identity and his manager says "You don't have loved ones! Who are you talking about? Your dead parents? That girlfriend you treat like dirt?"
Jeff doesn't know who he is, he only knows his face.

Chapter 29: Las Vegas.

The Guardian didn’t have a gambling problem; at least he didn’t think he did. To him it was less an addiction and more an interest; he would never admit to himself that he was addicted to slot machines. It was difficult for him to play slots when he was excited (which was all the time because playing slots excited him) because he would lose control of his strength and pull a lever off. Even in his powered down mode he was still much stronger than a normal man. Not quite as strong as Avenger at full light absorption but still strong enough to pull a door off its hinges if he wasn’t careful. Drinking glasses were also common victims of his large and powerful hands and he had a policy of never rescuing kittens from trees due to a bad experience early in his career as a hero. When he had entered the Casino, the Guardian hadn’t noticed the pair of men standing off in the corner of the casino, looking the place over.

And the two men hadn’t seen the Guardian either, though he stuck out like a sore thumb. They had been too busy staring at one of the pretty blondes with all the shiny jewelry at the blackjack table. The Guardian was having a string of poor luck with the slots today. The day before he had actually come out on top with about $750 in winnings, but today he had already lost half of those winnings trying to repeat the success. He pulled the little lever down as gently as he could and watched with rapt attention the three cascading rolls of symbols as they slowed down and set in place. Bar, bar, cherry, damn it. He pulled the lever again with the same results. He may have continued until he ran out of money but the power cut out abruptly when he had $10 left. People gasped and whispered, wondering why the lights and the machines had suddenly shut down. The doors of the Casino were knocked inward by two large men with a pneumatic battering ram, most likely one stolen from a Police inventory or purchased off the black market.

The two men that the Guardian hadn’t noticed were now both toting VZ-61 Scorpion machine-pistols and waving them around. The Guardian didn’t get up yet, he had to see what he was dealing with, so far five men were inside the Casino’s main room, but there was without a doubt more men outside and there was a good chance that more of them were hidden inside, disguised as patrons and employees. The fact that they had the battering ram meant that they meant business. Within a short time nearly a dozen more men entered from outside and several employees and more than ten patrons joined the men and revealed their weapons.

All of the men from inside the Casino had small concealed weapons like Scorpions, H&K MP7’s, Parker Hale PDW’s, and QCW-05’s. The men from outside were a different story, one of the two men who had operated the ram was now carrying an RPG over his shoulder, evidently in case he had to shoot down Police Helicopters or something like that. The other ram operator was holding an FN Minimi which we waved around with frightening glee. What shocked the Guardian was not how well armed the men were, but how bold they were. They wore no masks and seemed not to care about their identities being revealed, although they did mitigate this somewhat by cutting off the power and disabling the security cameras. Their faces were the only parts of their bodies not to be protected; in all other areas they had some form of protection. The men from outside were decked-out head to toe with Army issue Kevlar with steel and ceramic plates protecting their chests, shoulders, thighs, and backs.

Their gloves were the kind that protected against fire and dog bites, they had prepared for practically anything and everything the police could throw at them. The Guardian also noticed that the ears of one of the men was protected by special filters the kind of filters that filtered out the sounds that were emitted by special Police riot gear. The first thing they did was to herd the men and women into different sections of the Casino, women separate from men. They cleaned out the tables first before moving into the slots. The Guardian was sufficiently impressed by their organization and forethought to play along with them before trying anything stupid. There was nothing they had that could threaten him, but they could hurt a lot of people if he wasn’t careful.

A few women were screaming hysterically, par for the course for any true Casino/Hotel/Bank/Cruise Ship robbery and the gunmen didn’t seem to mind too much, they were evidently all veterans of such operations. There was little that could perturb them or put them on edge. Some of the men (including the two large men with heavy weapons) were staying outside and making sure that the Police stayed far away from the Casino. The police didn’t attempt to set a barricade of cars and start a standoff, mostly because of the fact that they had no idea how many men were inside and they didn’t want to test the criminal’s resolve and risk a gunfight with an RPG involved.

The Guardian couldn’t tell who they were exactly, their organization and equipment would suggest a powerful terrorist cell, yet the fact they were robbing a Casino would suggest they were somewhat less ideologically motivated and more acquisitively motivated. By the time the last Blackjack table was cleared and all the entrances and exits were secured by the small army of robbers something curious happened. Six of the men nearest the broken down entrance began to clear the area of rubble and broken glass created when they knocked the doors down. The men picked the doors off from the ground and set them aside on the walls diligently. Then things took a turn for the weird. The six men, guns held in their hands and resting on their shoulders as if they were soldiers undergoing inspection and their feet held firmly together stood in two lines of three men each.

They appeared to be standing at attention, awaiting someone’s arrival. And then he hit the scene. He was a tall thirty-something year old man with slick-back black hair and a thin moustache and he entered the Casino as if he were a Prince entering his throne room. He was dressed no differently than any of the other men with black gloves, Kevlar, pockets everywhere and pouches for a walkie-talkie and heavy combat boots and yet he was unmistakably the leader of the operation. It was clear from the way the men had made everything ready for his arrival and had stood at attention for him that they either feared him or respected him or both (or he paid them extremely well). At his hips two modified Walter SP22 Pistols dangled off a pair of holsters a bit too small to hold them properly. The effect was that they hung out and gave the impression that his hips were wider than they really were. The man took two quick glances to his left and to his right, noting the doors and the men.

“What no drum roll?” the man asked jovially. Besides his attire and the two large guns he had there was little about the man that seemed menacing or frightening. His voice wasn’t rough or threatening; in a way it was almost funny. At least it was funny to the Guardian who thought the man sounded a bit like Norm MacDonald. What made it serious was the fact that the man had two guns. “So how is everyone?” the leader of the gang was strutting toward the blackjack table, smiling widely and walking with the sort of energy of a man who just found out he was the father of a baby boy, “Are you feeling good? I know I am. Listen up folks!” He pulled his two pistols out of his holsters and began waving them over his head, “My name is Francis Lalanne, and I’ll be your thief today!”

He holstered his weapons once more and flashed a good-natured smile to a cocktail waitress being held at gunpoint by one of his men, “Now boys, I still see some people back there at the slots that haven’t been tended to and I think they might feel left out,” He patted one of the men on the shoulder and slipped a crisp $100 bill in one of his pockets, “Here’s your bonus Ray, make sure those people join the others on the floor but leave that big drink of water to me, I got a feeling about him,” Lalanne pointed at the Guardian who thus far had tried to look as unassuming as possible. Lalanne strode toward the Guardian calmly and without menace, in fact he was smiling the entire time, “So big guy, you aren’t going to give us any trouble right?” He winked.

“No, I won’t give you any trouble. Now you want me to get on the floor with the rest of them?” The Guardian tried to sound as unthreatening as possible, though his size made him threatening nonetheless. Yet Lalanne was calm and composed around him.
“No, my friend, you and I are gonna stay right here and have a nice little chat while my associates rob this honest establishment blind. Sound like a plan?” The Guardian didn’t know what to expect from this man who was quite different from all the robbers he had ever met before.
“Yeah, sounds real nice,” The Guardian said.
“Glad you agree big guy,” Lalanne playfully nudged the Guardian and smiled broadly.

Ohh that was just odd. I liked it! I hope the next chapter explanes what happens!!! I wonder who the robber is and if he kbnow that the man is the Guardian? he must know, I mean, you said he had a rather recondnisable face!

I haven't made up my mind even now if Lalanne really knows who the Guardian is and he's just playing along to keep him from interfering or if he genuinely doesn't know. Remember the Guardian isn't very famous.

Chapter 30: The Arctic Circle.

Jade Empress awoke to the sight of Demon staring into her eyes from across the room. She momentarily gasped but her attention was drawn away from the monster standing ten feet away and drawn toward the fact that she was wearing the Polar-Man’s cape.
“Ah you’re awake, that’s good,” The Polar-Man was too busy working on something to turn around, but he could tell from her gasp that Jade Empress was awake.

“What the hell happened?” Jade Empress asked, rather angry for being frightened like that.
“I should think you would thank me for saving your life and mending your substantial wounds, but I suppose an annoying and obvious question is more than appropriate,” the Polar-Man said with a bemused tone. Jade Empress felt her back; to her surprise the scar was gone. Her face too was in pristine condition, as if the fight had never happened. But the scars weren’t the only thing that had vanished. Jade Empress realized that her costume was gone and that underneath the warm, white cape all she had was her underwear, “Did you undress me?” Jade Empress asked, feeling somewhat violated. She imagined the Polar-Man doing terrible things to her while she was unconscious.

“No, no, of course not, I mean there wasn’t much for me to undress, that slash to the back from Demon cut through your costume and caused the pieces to just fall off of you. They’re over there if you feel more comfortable with them on.” The Polar-Man pointed to a small stone pedestal where Jade Empress’s metal costume was lying. Acting quickly she got out of the robes and into her costume with speed that impressed even the Polar-Man.

“Well I suppose I should you for not fulfilling my expectations and leaving me to die, or worse,” Jade Empress said, still without any warmth in her voice. Despite what she thought of him, Jade Empress knew somehow that the Polar-Man had been as perfect a gentleman as could be expected from someone of his dubious ethical credentials.
“It was my way of thanking you for distracting Demon while I fetched this little device,” The Polar-Man picked up a vaguely gun-shaped object and tossed it at Jade Empress. The Chinese heroine was able to deftly catch the device before it hit the floor.
“What is it?” Jade Empress searched the surface of the item for signs of welding, circuitry, or any familiar technology but found nothing.

“Describing it to the layman is difficult, but essentially it steals an object’s momentum, all of it. At least that’s how it works in practice, the real explanation is much more complicated and would just entail me throwing out physics terms and long numbers for several hours while you fall asleep and Demon escapes. Suffice it to say that Demon cannot move because of it, like a fly trapped in Amber,” The Polar-Man was exceptionally proud of his engineering skills and loved to rub in how much more knowledgeable he was than any other man on the planet. If Jade Empress had asked to be given the real explanation the Polar-Man wouldn’t have skipped a beat. That’s how much he loved his own voice.
“So now that we have him here, what comes next?” Jade Empress asked.

“Now we find out where our target is, it shouldn’t be hard, the man is a torrent of all kinds of energy. I’ve often thought about how many cities the man could power if you stuck him in a generator,” the Polar-Man’s eyes widened at the thought.
“Get back on topic,” snapped Jade Empress, “Once we find Mister Magnificent’s position what do we do?”
“We wait for further orders, don’t forget we are acting as agents of your nation right now, if the General Secretary tells us to act we shall act, but until then we wait,” the Polar-Man was evidently drawing up the plans for something to contain and transport Demon safely.

On yet another screen he was modifying the design of his prosthetic eye and toying with new ideas. He had hastily repaired it after it was broken by Demon’s fist, but he desired something more out of it. He was able to create and modify both designs simultaneously, though it put some strain on him to separate his field of thought into two distinct and independently coherent streams.
“I’m no expert, but that looks like the Orbital Launch Vehicle my country lent you,” Jade Empress said, evidently surprised he was able to reverse engineer it.

“Yes it is, at least in spirit. But it’s a whole different animal. It’s much more durable and it’s piloted by a computer for a single predetermined path. It has plenty of countermeasures should the passenger overcome his artificial paralysis, namely a self-destruct mechanism that would hopefully stun the creature for a short time at the very least,” the Polar-Man didn’t sound very confident. But he did seem to think that as long as Demon could be kept under control during the flight the rest would work itself out. Jade Empress wished she could share his optimism.

I love the Polar-man's vanity and intellegence. It makes him sone what comical to read about. I like him, he is a good villan. Hahahaha he makes me laugh every time! (Its a good thing to have liked villans).

Yeah he's tied with Avenger as my favorite character of the book.

From the Journal of Sir John Talbot:

May 7th, 1997:

“I made my bimonthly appearance at a meeting of the Board of Directors for Polar Industries today. Halfway through I was wondering why they were all looking at me like I wasn’t wearing pants. A quick scan of my person made it clear that I was wearing pants, just the wrong pair. I was still in costume! I hadn’t changed out; I suppose I wasn’t in the right frame of mind. The rush I felt! I had been flying aimlessly around when I noticed a commotion at a Bank in the East End, the name of the establishment eludes me, it was being robbed by the super-criminal known as Haze. Well at that point I reached a juncture: should I put a stop to her crimes or should I do something more rewarding? I had already performed several good deeds, so what was the harm of being naughty for once? I arrived on the spot just in time for the back of my head to block a bullet that would have put a hole in Haze’s pretty head. She had heard of me, evidently word travels quickly in the Underworld, and as such was on guard immediately. She was flinging some of her special toxins but I was able to avoid the vile chemicals. I wasted no time in showing her my intentions by incapacitating the men who were trying to apprehend her. I offered her a get-away which she accepted. I’m not sure what her plan was exactly, for all her lethality and her ravishing looks she wasn’t the greatest of planners. If I hadn’t been there her career would have been over by now. When we were safe, far out of the premises of London and the jurisdiction of its officers, I set her down, but not before accepting my reward. And no, the reward wasn’t the money.”

May 18th, 1997:

“I saw him today, the Man of Might, Mister Magnificent. He must have been on his way to something calamitous, for he didn’t try to stop me from robbing the bank. It was fortunate that he was on such a tight schedule, as I’m not keen on testing the limits of my strength against such a powerful being.”

June 6th, 1997:

“I have managed, through a complex and intricate web of back-room deals and arrangements to make myself fairly immune to English law. So long as I don’t leave any corpses lying around or deliberately target Her Majesty’s police and officials, the police will make no attempt to hinder me. The primary boon from this arrangement is that I can still run my company without fear of being shut-down. The arrangement is not full-proof however, continental superheroes have made no secret of the fact that if they see me they will try and take me down. Still I grow stronger by the day, and I’m beginning to wonder how hollow their threats may be.”

Is that a note of fear in the Polar-man's journal entry? ahh well, that was funny, about his pants issue. I supose people would have thought him insane for wareing a costume to a buisness meeting. hehehe I would have broke off laughing!

Well his board members knew who he was, you don't laugh at your boss, especially if he has super-strength.

Chapter 31: Las Vegas.

Francis Lalanne wasn’t brandishing a weapon, but he didn’t think he needed to, not when he had the situation under control. Lalanne took a seat at a Slot Machine across from the man and got comfortable. He scanned the men and women who were huddled on the floor. Many of them kept their eyes to the ground, avoiding eye contact with any of the gunmen so as not to give them a reason to become violent. One blonde Cocktail waitress looked up for a brief second and made eye contact with Lalanne himself. Her gaze darted back to the floor quickly but it was too late.

“Hey you over there, pretty lady, come over here!” he was talking to the young blonde Cocktail Waitress. At first she didn’t respond, she was too frightened, “Hey don’t be afraid, just get over here!” Lalanne shouted in his strange off-kilter voice. The woman was intimidated by the one of the gunmen standing near her, and it was this fear that kept her from moving. Lalanne picked up on this and gestured for the man to move aside to give the young lady some space, “Come on, don’t be scared, I won’t hurt you.” Lalanne beckoned her to him. The young woman threw a swift glance to one of her coworkers who gave a quick nod. Not seeing any way out of it and not wanting to test the thief’s patience she got up from the floor, tiptoed nervously past the gunmen and after some hesitation came to Lalanne’s side.

Lalanne looked her over approvingly. Neither the Guardian nor the young lady knew what to expect from Lalanne. So far he had shown himself to be amicable, yet first impressions can be horribly apocryphal. Much to the girl’s relief Lalanne didn’t try to touch her or intrude on her personal space. He just whistled and sat on his high stool, “You’re a fine looking lady, what’s your name?” Lalanne was trying to avoid making her nervous so he tried his best to keep away from her, a difficult task.
“My… my name?” the girl had trouble finding the courage to speak. The only words she could manage were scarcely whispers.

“Yeah, your name, I want to know your name,” Lalanne said.
“Amber,” the girl said, her legs quivering and her hair falling apart as the hairpins fell out due to her shaking.
“Amber,” Lalanne nodded approvingly, “pretty name for a pretty lady like you. Alright Amber, would you be a good girl and get me a drink back there from the bar, oh and get one for yourself too, you look like you could use one,” Lalanne winked and brushed a lock of blonde hair away from the girl’s eye. She didn’t freak out, to Lalanne’s relief.
“What kind of drink do you want?” She asked, not wanting to disappoint him.
“Surprise me, just don’t slip me a roofie,” he laughed, hoping to diffuse some of the girl’s anxiety, “And what about you big guy?” Lalanne turned his attention back to the Guardian.

“What about me?” the Guardian asked.
“What do you want from the bar? What do you drink? You look like a Tequila man to me, are you a tequila man?” The Guardian had never encountered a thief like him. In fact the Guardian was actually starting to feel sorry that he was going to have to beat him and his men senseless.
“I don’t really drink,” the Guardian said, answering honestly. The last time he had gotten drunk was also the last time his cousin could walk; he had good reason to avoid liquor. Yet Lalanne wasn’t the sort to take no for an answer.
“He’ll have whatever I’m having,” Lalanne said, turning back to Amber. Amber turned around and hastily scuttled to the bar, almost tripping over a Casino patron on her way (an act for which she apologized profusely).

Lalanne followed her movements with his eyes, “She’s got great legs,” Lalanne said admiringly. He then turned back to his large, mysterious friend and tried to figure out who he was. The large man seemed familiar somehow, and Lalanne got a peculiar vibe from him. He felt that the man was someone he had to watch out for, someone who might cause trouble for his operation. And yet he also knew that the man wouldn’t do anything with so many people in danger.
“So big guy, you look familiar,” Lalanne smiled waggishly, “I feel like I’ve seen you before, like on TV,” the Guardian was worried that he might know his identity, and was just toying with him, “You play football don’t you?” He pantomimed catching a ball and running with it. The Guardian felt relieved by the question, more than relieved.

He started to laugh.
“Guilty as charged,” the Guardian admitted with a wide grin and a shrug, trying to act somewhat embarrassed at being “recognized”.
“Get out of here, what team do you play for? No don’t tell me, I can figure it out,” Lalanne pressed his hand against his head and began to think through all the football players he knew that matched the man’s build, skin tone, and height. There were unsurprisingly a lot of them that came to mind, “Well I’m a huge Raiders fan, I know their entire roster, so I know it’s not the Raiders. Is it the Cowboys?” He asked.
“Guess again,” the Guardian said.

“Giants, Colts, Steelers?” Lalanne continued, “Buccaneers, Dolphins, Saints, Lions?”
“You got it, it’s the Lions,” the Guardian said, realizing that the Lions were an unpopular team and Lalanne probably wouldn’t know any of their roster.
“Really? Ouch, I must have seen you giving some post-defeat speech then,” Lalanne said with a pained expression on his face.
“Hey, we try,” the Guardian said with a slight shrug.
“Ever met anyone famous?” Lalanne asked.

“Met the President once,” the Guardian answered truthfully.
“Really, how’d that happen?” Lalanne asked.
“He went to one of our games,” the Guardian said. He had actually met the President after saving him from an assassination attempt that the public never found out about. The President thanked him and promised that one day the world would know about his service to his country, but only after such time that the threat of the terrorist organization attempting the assassination has ended; which may never come to pass in the Guardian’s lifetime, “And he wanted to meet all of us, so like everyone else on the team I got to shake his hand.”

“I had no idea the President was a Lions fan,” Lalanne said, rather surprised to hear the story.
“Oh not publicly,” the Guardian said, “But if we kick ass this season you’d better believe he’s gonna show up on TV in a blue and white jersey.”
“I see,” Lalanne spotted Amber coming to him with a cocktail, “Hey is that Gin, or Vodka?” He asked, pointing at the drink.
“It’s uhh—”
“Because if it’s Gin I’ll shoot ‘ya,” Lalanne said, pointing his finger at her with his index finger and thumb making the shape of a gun.

Her eyes were blank with terror, “Just a joke,” Lalanne assured her, “Hand it over,” while he took the drink the vault of the casino was cracked open and the men started helping themselves to the piles of cash stashed within, “Mmmm, not bad Amber,” the Guardian took the other cocktail, the one that Lalanne had ordered for him and stared at it for some time, “Hey big guy you need to try this, it’s good.” Lalanne said, finishing his with a gulp followed by a slight wince. The Guardian thought about it for a moment before deciding that it was best not to offend the man who commanded so many armed thugs and in a quick motion downed the entire cocktail. To him alcohol was neither pleasurable nor painful, all it was just a hazard and a detriment to his self-control.

“Wow I’ve never seen a man take in Vodka like that without even blinking,” Lalanne said, obviously impressed.
“I’ve just got a good tolerance, that’s all,” the Guardian said modestly.
“Hey Amber,” Lalanne turned back to Amber, who had not yet left his side, “How ‘bout another round? Here this is for you,” Lalanne winked and gave her a crisp hundred dollar bill and sent her on her way.
“Isn’t that a little counterproductive?” the Guardian asked.
“What is?”

“I mean, you’re a thief aren’t you?”
“Listen big guy, I may be robbing this Casino but I’m not robbing you, her, or any of the fine patrons of this crooked establishment. There are plenty of spoils from the Casino; I don’t need to start taking people’s watches. Now I stole drinks from the Casino, but I still believe in tipping. That’s just how I was raised,” Lalanne said. Lalanne shared one thing in common with most thieves that the Guardian had encountered: a skewed set of values.
“So why exactly are you robbing the Casino in the first place?” the Guardian asked.

“Casinos are wonderful targets my friend. Plenty of money, always a fully stocked bar nearby, and most importantly no kids,” Lalanne said.
“What are kids too much trouble to hold hostage?” the Guardian asked.
“That’s not it; I just don’t like it when kids get in the way. I mean kids are the reason I’m doing this, my kids specifically,” Lalanne said.
“You’re robbing the Casino for your kids?” the Guardian asked, his eyes narrowing in suspicion.
“I’m thirty-two years young, got two beautiful little daughters, seven years divorced, and no legitimate skills to speak of. What I am good at are three things: organizing an operation, making friends and contacts with all sorts of shady characters, and keeping my cool when a dozen guns are being pointed at me. Now you tell me what I could do with those skills other than robbing a Casino?”

“Well you got me there,” the Guardian conceded, “Do you have a picture of your kids with you?”
“Sure, I keep it in my wallet,” Lalanne produced a faded 3×5 inch photograph from his black leather wallet and handed it to the Guardian. The Guardian took hold of it with his massive hands and studied it. Somehow he doubted this was the right photo, it was a black and white portrait of a man in an old-fashioned suit with a half-grin on his face, “Woops, that’s the wrong one,” Lalanne snatched the photo back, “That’s John Dillinger, he’s kinda my hero,” Lalanne said with a sheepish smile.
“It’s always good to have a hero, someone to aspire to,” the Guardian said.

“Here we are, this is the photo,” Lalanne proudly handed the Guardian another 3×5 photo, this time a portrait of two small girls, between the ages of nine and eleven. One was blonde and the other was a brunette but otherwise they appeared to be identical twins.
“So what do they think of their daddy the thief?” the Guardian asked. Lalanne hung his head low.
“They don’t know what I do for a living,” Lalanne admitted, “When they turn sixteen, assuming I haven’t been gunned down by then, I’ll tell them the truth,” Lalanne said.

“That’s gonna be one hell of a sweet sixteen, isn’t it?” the Guardian said with a smile.
“Yeah, I’ll probably have to turn to my old friend Jack Daniels for some encouragement before I tell them,” Lalanne said, scratching his head.
“I imagine they must live a pretty comfortable life,” the Guardian said.
“How’s that?” Lalanne asked.
“Well I mean a couple of heists like this a year must bring in some major coin, right?” the Guardian observed.
“Well see that’s just not true, there are a lot of expenses to deal with,” Lalanne said defensively.
“Really?” the Guardian asked, “What sort of expenses?”

“For starters I have to outfit thirty guys in state of the art equipment then I got to have background checks run on all of them to make sure they’re not serious mental cases. After that’s done I have to go through the painstaking process of getting guys on the inside. Now we’re talking actual job interviews, forged references, and heavy bribes. After that’s over I have to organize another smaller job just to get the blueprints to the place. And then there’s the cut, each one of these guys is taking two point five percent with him. That leaves me with twenty-five percent of the loot assuming nobody decides to double-cross me for my share. After I get said twenty-five percent I have to pay back a whole load of investors,” Lalanne was getting very animated with every point.

“What hold up, did you say investors?” the Guardian asked, concerned with the word’s meaning in context. He imagined a room filled with wealthy businessmen watching a PowerPoint presentation from Lalanne trying to convince them of the merits of bankrolling his robbery of the Casino.
“Oh yeah, you think I was the one who put up the startup cash for this job?”
“Am I right in thinking that these investors are all legitimate businessmen?” the Guardian asked.

“Some of them are. It depends how loosely you define “legitimate”,” Lalanne said with a shrug, “But anyhow, I gotta pay them back. That will probably come out to twenty percent of the payoff. And then comes the alimony,” Lalanne said with a grimace, “It’s not like I don’t wish that I could have been born with some other skills, you know. I mean if I was born with your build I’d be playing football too, or wrestling or something. Hey how much do you weigh?” The Guardian hated answering that question. In truth he weighed close to five hundred pounds, which was demonstrated by how the stool he was sitting on creaked horribly whenever he shifted his weight, but he always lied and gave another smaller number.
“Three-eighty-seven,” the Guardian lied. Lalanne nodded and whistled.

“Damn, bet you didn’t have any bully problems when you were a kid,” Lalanne said offhandedly. Images and sounds flooded the Guardian’s mind; he remembered mocking calls and shoving, followed by cries of anguish as the boy who was shoving him and mocking him felt his ribs crack and split. That was years ago but it was still fresh in his mind.
“No, no bully problems,” the Guardian concurred.

Well, that is a twisted villan. But why on earth would he go ahead and explane his entire stratige to a giant, thretining man who is also a victom? it makes not sence to me, but it gives him a certain edge whis i find intregaing

Lalanne's not really a villain, he's sort of like a Robin Hood (minus giving money to the poor though).

Not to proud of this next chapter.

Chapter 32: Somewhere in New England.

The Father had come in early this morning for some reason, perhaps he had forgotten something or perhaps he had woken up earlier than usual and decided it would be fun to go into the Church at five in the morning, before even the Deacon had shown up. When he entered the Church, pushing open the large doors and turning on a single overhead light he saw the unmistakable shape of a man inside of the Confession Booth. This startled him but didn’t frighten him for he had experienced such things before, often times it was a drunk who had wandered in and forgotten where he was when the Church closed its doors.

The man was clearly a large one, though that was the only thing the Father could discern given the lack of light. After a little while the Father addressed the man, asking him who he was and why and how he was in the Church at such an hour. The man simply answered: “I’m nobody.” After some time it was apparent that the man wanted to confess some sins, so being a dutiful priest the Father took the booth next to the man and awaited his confessions. The Father tried to look through the screen that separated the booths and was designed to make the process anonymous but failed to discover who the person was as the man was facing the opposite direction and had his back turned to the Father.
“I’ve not heard your voice before, tell me, are you from out of town?” the Father asked.

“Yes, I’m just visiting,” the man answered.
“And where is your parish?” the Father asked.
“I’m not… I’m not really Catholic,” the man replied.
“Ah so you’re lapsed,” the Father said, shaking his head.
“No, I mean I was born Lutheran,” the man answered.
“Then why are you here? Lutherans don’t believe in the need for a Priest like me when they need to talk with God.” The Father said.

“I don’t need to talk with God, right now I need someone to talk to, but it doesn’t have to be God,” the man said.
“Well sir, sounds to me like what you’re looking for is a help hotline,” the Father suggested.
“I’m not thinking about killing myself,” the man replied, “I just need someone to talk to, someone anonymous, someone who’s good at listening, and I figure that’s a large part of what you do, you listen to people, you listen to people who have problems.” The man’s voice was depressed and troubled. The Father was getting excited however; this was the sort of thing he always hoped for, a chance to actually help someone instead of listening to people giving lip service.
“Well what sort of problems do you have?” the Father asked him eagerly.

“Serious problems,” the man said.
“You’re going to have to be a little more specific,” the Father said. For a while the man said nothing, and then when the Father was beginning to suspect he had fallen asleep he began to talk again.
“My problem is that I don’t know what’s real anymore,” the man said. The Father was somewhat taken aback by this, it wasn’t the run of the mill problem that could be solved with a simple chat, “Sometimes I’ll close my eyes and I’ll have missed an entire day as if I slept through it, but I know I haven’t slept through it because things have happened that I only could have done, terrible things.”

“What sort of terrible things?”
“People getting hurt for one, things getting broken, and a whole lot of other problems,” the man said ruefully, “So tell me Father, if I’m not really in control when these things happen am I responsible?” the Father really wasn’t equipped to answer that question.
“I suppose that all depends on whether or not you feel any guilt for it. Do you?”

“No, I try to but I just can’t seem to care anymore, it’s like I can’t separate what’s real and what isn’t and as a result everything seems inconsequential and unreal,” as the man spoke the Father beheld a strange phenomena, the man began to glow with a pale blue light, “I’m trying to find something that’s still real. See I don’t even know if I’m really talking to you right now, if this Church is even real,” the light grew in intensity and so did the fear and apprehension of the Father.
“Son, I don’t think I’m the right person for you to go to, I think you need a Psychiatrist,” the Father said.
“Oh so you think I’m crazy then?” the man’s voice had ceased being dejected and low and was now hard and agitated; the change was like a light switch being flipped on.

“I didn’t say that,” the Father said.
“No, no I understand,” the man stood up from his seat and the pale blue light became blinding, “Thanks, I feel a lot better.” Violently the conversation ended, with the man seemingly disappearing in an instant, followed closely by a powerful shockwave. The great shockwave tore the Church apart and sent the Father flying through the wooden wall and into the grass courtyard.

A heavy wooden beam that had been tossed up by the shock landed on the Father’s lower body, thankfully not breaking anything but putting an immense weight on him that coupled with the shock of being tossed through the wall was sufficient to make him faint. The last thing the poor man saw before blacking out was the sight of a white-clad man surrounded by a field of blue light rocketing into the air.

Wait, that was mister magnificent right? or was that the Polar-man? i can't recall how mister magnificent dressed, except for the emblen on his chest.
ohh and i thought that it was a good chapter

I would think that the man's instability would have tipped you off.

well yes it did, but i still didn't remember mister magnificent's costume cokor scheme
no im compleatly confused. was it mister magnificent? i mean everything he did and talked about made me assume it was him, but i you said mister magnificent had blue in his clothes. ether way I still really liked that chapter
it must be Mister Magnificent, lol, how could I have even hosted such a silly idea that it was anyone other than him. but, i likes that chapter. I would be proud of it lol. it was well done. very discriptive!

when I originally wrote it... it lacked real substance but I guess I improved it when I edited the book while in France. See the original product was rather shoddy and read like a bad Batman fanfic or something, now it's a lot better. Sometimes I get the urge to look over some of my older attempts at literature and maybe redo it with what I know now but it sorta makes me sick just reading it.

hahaha i understand when i look at things i wrote a while ago, it all looks terrable. but your work is amazing, really professional! you have to get this published!!! I LOVE IT! Im shure lots of others would read it too!!!