10/15/12 - The Reclamation War - Epilogue

At first, there's just the silent darkness -- total and absolute.

The Dragon is unsure how long he's floating in it. Is it hours, or days? Weeks or months? Maybe even years?

He does not care. All sense of time and space have floated away, here in the black, and with it any anxieties or fears he might have had.

He cannot hear the constant communications of The Flier within his mind, anymore. He cannot feel the rush of the winds on his body, or sense the power as it courses through him. He cannot sense the movements of those who work and toil within the aircraft he has become.

And, most disconcertingly of all, he can no longer feel the presence of the Imago within him, or sense that his Leader is near, anymore.

A lesser mind could have gone mad from this sudden, all-encompassing disconnection -- especially when he wonders how he got here, and flashes back to what little memory remains of the epic battle he just lost. Anyone else might be screaming in the hopes of being heard by some higher power, or gibbering in terror at the thought that this is death, and there's nothing awaiting but an eternity of black.

But he is no sad little soul, left to wander unawares in the world. He is The Dragon.

And he realizes that he may have finally achieved the perfect moment of Zen that accompanies the removal of all needs, desires, and distractions.

He gets the sense that he had been striving towards something, at the end of his life. Perhaps this is what he would have found at the end of that striving, perhaps not. But if this final, darkened silence is to be his new reality, then he can both accept and be content within it.

He can simply be.

Of course, that's when everything goes wrong.

At first, he's not sure where the light is coming from. There is a weird flickering in front of him, and that brings with it both awareness and pain.

The light solidifies, and with it the agony. Horizontal lines unfold, like an old television warming up. Shapes slowly resolve themselves, flickering and crackling.

(He has a flashback to a scene from that one, terrible western movie he watched along with SPYGOD, that one time, while pretending to be his lover. Only that was played for laughs. This makes him feel dread, once more.)

There is a brightness, sharp and painful, and then he's seeing things, once more. He sees a vast and ruined -- and eerily silent -- landscape: toppled stone temples and buildings, strewn with smoking heaps of twisted metal. Smokeless fires burn out of control, here and there, and men and women in garish, metal suits lie broken under the Sun.

Beyond it all is an ocean, roiling and vast. In that ocean he can see things moving around, just under its surface, or bobbing just above it. Wondrous and terrible things, seemingly born from nightmares inspired by the unknown depths of the wet below.

Just out of his field of vision -- which he cannot change, for he cannot move -- stands a great, white colossus, somehow standing upon the ocean, yet not going up or down with its waves. Its fists are caked with burning debris, and its baleful gaze sees all things at once.

His vision shifts again, as though someone were moving his head. And then someone is. He is picked up by hands, lifted up, and shown the rest of the landscape around him.

And at last he realizes what he is seeing, and cries out silently, in massive, Nirvana-dispelling despair.

The Lost City of the Imago is destroyed -- cracked and broken, shattered and flattened. Massive War Spawn drive their tentacles and pincers into what little remains, and pull out limp and passive Imago to shove into their massive, toothy maws.

And all around the ruin lies the sorry, smoking remnants of what was once The Flier -- what was once him. Heaps of metal and plastic smolder and buckle, and except for the occasional twitch or shudder, there is no sign of it trying to put itself back together again.

The Flier is dead. His body is gone.

And The Dragon cannot feel anything.

At some point, he wonders why he's still being held aloft. Then the hands that are keeping him up put him down on the ground, and turn him back to face their owner.

It's SPYGOD, of course.

He's still naked, and doesn't have so much as a scratch on him. He must have healed all that damage from earlier, and for that The Dragon curses him.

He's smiling, too, but it's not the kind smile, or the happy smile, or the "let's !@#$" smile. It's the smile he gives those he's just utterly and completely beaten, just before delivering the coup de grace.

The death smile. 

He's talking, SPYGOD is, but The Dragon cannot hear any of it. His eyes are working -- probably reconnected by his former lover -- but the ears are out of action, and probably strewn over a nearby heap, or buried under it.

As such, he does not hear the man say what he needs to say at this moment, though he can make out a few words, here and there. "Nice try," is one key phrase, as are "stupid," "evil," "alien," and "!@#$heads."

At some point, he stops rattling off insults and accusations, and just looks at him. When he starts up again, he seems almost tender, but The Dragon knows this is not directed at him. It's directed at the man The Dragon once was -- the dying, Chinese super-spy who foolishly threw in with GORGON in the hopes of gaining a new, healthy body, and eventually betraying them for his own purposes.

That one had no idea that the uploading procedure killed as it copied. He had no inkling, until it was too late, that the process made a new being: one made up of the memories of the original, but the mind and soul of an Imago.

And then one Dragon was dead and gone -- dust on the ground of the house they'd imprisoned him in --- and a new Dragon was alive and well, and ready to be put into action.

SPYGOD knows this, now (though how, exactly, is unknown). And now that he's no longer interested in mourning the man he loved -- at least for now -- he's gone back to excoriating The Dragon for having been born from that dead man's ashes. He's raging, screaming, frothing at the mouth. He's shaking his fists and shrieking, his face a mere inch away from whatever The Dragon is using to see with.

The Dragon cannot reply to this, any more than he can hear. He can only watch, helplessly, and wonder when the man who's beaten him will finally get it over with.

Or will he? This is the first time a takeover of the entire world has succeeded so well for so long. Will The Dragon be captured, then? Will he be nursed back to health, to some degree, and then put on trial? Will he be refitted and rebuilt, just to be torn down and executed for his role in things?

For a moment, he imagines himself on the witness stand -- proud and defiant. He will have nothing to say but the truth, and nothing to offer for defense except for the simple fact that he wanted to save his species from captivity, and then from the certain annihilation this planet will soon experience at the hands of (UNINTELLIGIBLE CONCEPT). 

He will proudly go to whatever guillotine they might make for him. He will stare into the executioner's eyes for only so long, and then stare into the distance, noble in death.

He did what he did for love, and let that be his epitaph.

He's so wrapped up in that thought that he almost loses track of SPYGOD's harangue. When he catches up, he realizes that the man isn't screaming or yelling, anymore. He's stepping back a few paces and putting his hands on his hips.

He's saying something about drinks, now. "Whiskey," "vodka," and "Scotch." "Beer," "beer," and more "beer."

And something about not having a chance to visit the bathroom since he left Tokyo...

The Dragon gasps and tries to protest what's about to happen, but he can't. He can only watch as SPYGOD reaches down, takes hold of his impossible genitals -- now unrolling just like a horse's penis -- and unleashes a heavy, steady, firehose-stream of caustic, smoking god-urine right into The Dragon's face.

It's like being washed away by a breaking, yellow tsunami at first, and then, for the first time since his Flier-body was smashed into the Lost City, he can at last feel pain. A horrible, nauseating, burning sensation as the !@#$ rushes through his eye sockets and begins to melt his living brain.

And as he feels his memories and hopes and dreams turn to runny, bloody mush in his skull -- reliving the same agony the real Dragon went through, in his last moments of life -- he can actually hear SPYGOD's black and mocking laughter, following him down into whatever true fate now awaits the likes of him.

* * *

And so -- as he sees nothing at all, ever again -- The Dragon does not see the world as it crawls back up into the light at the end of this black and red day.

He does not see common humanity rising up from fear and flight to retake their lives -- attacking those that would have killed them with any weapons they can bring to bear. He does not witness men, women, and precocious children smashing the skulls of the fallen, lest they get back up again and kill some more.

Today is not a good day to be merciful to a fallen foe.

He does not see what little remains of the strange armies his alien brothers and sisters fought against, and how they try to celebrate in the wake of this narrowest of victories. The term "Phyric" is used more than once, by some commanders who suffered much worse than others. And as for the spies who helped arrange these armies, most are simply too tired and weary to label it anything other than victory.

Today is not a good day to examine the costs too closely.

He does not see the sad, battered remnants of the heroes and strategic talents that SPYGOD and his mysterious "leader" assembled. Around the world, they stagger and stretch, wondering if this really is all over, or if they need to remain vigilant still. Some cheer, some cry, and some can only collapse in pure exhaustion, or else stare into the distance -- their minds broken from slaughter and loss.

Today is not a good day to feel like a hero.

He does not see the American President cheering and whooping it up from the safety of The B.U.I.L.D.I.N.G. in Neo York City, alternating between thanking his God and having some of Old Ben's special victory brew. He does not see how hard Ben Franklin is working to avoid saying something pithy or wise, now, knowing that it's best to let this man have this moment, as the sobering reality of what's to come will be painful enough.

Today is not a good day to be a leader of what little is left.

He does not see a group of demoralized men and women who could only stand by helplessly as the boy they fought tooth and nail to save from a monster dies under their watch -- his mind absorbed by a machine that seemed unwilling to do anything but kill his body. He does not see the disgusting thing that has just happened elsewhere in that building, while they struggled to save that boy, or the strange change that has just come over the city around them.

Today is not a good day to have not known the shape of the future.

He does not see the monster in human shape that his people bargained with, so many years ago, as he carefully slinks from these changes, unseen and unheard. He does not see that this person is still aroused from the ghastly and bloody horror he has created with his hands, a knife, and his genitals. He does not know this man's plans, or the terrible things he's about to do in their name.

Today is not a good day to be in the way of those who would shape the future.

He does not see a so-called outlaw journalist as he cries, holding the dead body of a woman he'd come to love. Neither of them saw as she walked between him and the weapon that was meant to take his life as he watched history happen, and how she did it with the certainty that comes from being in the right place at the right time. He does not see his allies and friends as they carry on the recording in his name, mourning both that loss and many, many more on this day.

Today is not a good day to have been focusing only on the big picture, and not seeing the small details.

He does not see one of the newly-minted heroes as she staggers downtown, amazed that she's still alive. He does not see the red-suited girl is so much in shock that she's having a hard time realizing how many of the new friends she made today, in battle, were not as lucky. He does not see up above her, on a tall building, where a young boy in a poorly-fitting, blue and white costume bleeds out from his nose and mouth, having given his all to keep a strange woman sniper alive. He does not see that the woman is long gone, having spared that boy's noble sacrifice next to no thought over the need to get away unseen.

Today is not a good day to have been called to one's destiny.

He does not see another group of demoralized men and women, as far South as one can get from Neo York City. He does not see a man stare at the blood on his blistered hands as he kneels in a dark hallway full of dead genetic experiments, too stunned at the events of the day to take it all in. He does not see the no-longer-hidden leader of the resistance as he waits for news from the outside world, somehow knowing that the greater parts of his plan have worked, but also knowing that many smaller and painful failures and oversights have yet to be tallied up.

And he does not see the self-proclaimed master magician of Earth as he kneels by one of those oversights -- the  brutalized body of the President's daughter -- and is unable to assuage the anguish of her mother or younger sister because there is nothing he can do, now.

Today is not a good day to have been too late to do anything.

He does not see what little remains of Alpha Base Seven, and the sorry, imploded remnants of its once-considerable crew -- brought down by fear, jealousy, and motives that may never be fully understood. He does not see the shattered remnants of a lunar escape pod, tumbling slowly back towards Earth in time with the expanding wave of debris from what was once Earth's best defense, and then its worst enemy. He does not see the small remnant of the man that destroyed that defense, barely kept alive by what little power his craft has left to give.

Today is not a good day to have been willing to sacrifice everything for the cause.

Nearer to him, The Dragon does not see a pair of men entwined together on the molecular level, shivering in and out of phase with reality as they fight to come back to it, step by step. Nor does he see the wreck of a repurposed Nazi flying saucer -- itself repurposed from alien technology -- as it falls to the bottom of the Pacific, trailing debris behind it. Amongst the things falling down are full bottles of vodka, a silken, never-cleaned cat pillow that says "Бегемот," and an AK-47.

Today is not a good day to have been along for the ride on a plan too uncertain to write down. 

He does not see a taciturn man inside a great, white robot as he howls in despair, crying his eyes out over what he sees on the screen. He does not see the burning, mangled horror that is the center of Tokyo, and the giant pile of dead Imago that dominates its center. He does not see an android that looks like a young girl lying atop that heap -- her head at a strange angle, her eyes dark and blank.

Today is not a good day to have risked what you loved in the name of a greater duty.

He does not see a gloriously ugly robot finally return to her secret, underground base, only to find it completely bare. He does not see that all of her work is gone, all of her tools are taken, all of her Slaughterbots have disappeared. He does not see that all that remains are ten words, carefully painted on the wall by the most dangerous woman in the world:

WHEN I SEE YOU, I WILL KILL YOU

START RUNNING. 

Today is not a good day to have been reckless in planning, or untrue with one's allies.

He also does not see, in a pocket reality, a metal monster screaming as it realizes that it has no way to return to our world, and gain its revenge upon SPYGOD for the crime of existing. He does not see that the exotic components in the machine it became have burned out from the strain it put itself under, trying to follow where its targets went. He does not see its comatose, meat body lying dead in a sorry splatter of blood, bone, and feeding tubes in Dubai -- a victim of the push and pull of fighting that took place there, earlier this day.

(Today is not a good day to have been a mentally !@#$ed-up supervillain, either, it would seem.)

And The Dragon does not see the living, either.

He does not see families as they reunite and thank their Gods that they have survived. He does not see communities band together to clean up the mess, put out their fires, and tend to their wounded. He does not see leaders come back out to gather their people, or new ones step forward to be counted in the moment of need.

He does not see old friends and new allies as they clasp hands, grateful for the presence and aid of one another. He does not see the brotherhood that comes with war as it transforms the hearts of many people around the world -- setting aside old hatreds and rivalries, and creating in their place the hope for a new beginning. He does not see that the peace he and his people had falsely peddled has finally come around, at least for some.

He does not see that humanity has survived yet another attempt to subjugate, enslave, harvest, and kill it. He does not see that, while there are tears and sadness, there is also joy and hope. He does not see that from these ashes, this world can arise again -- perhaps stronger and better than the last time.

He does not see the story of human survival as it is written once again.

But he does see that today was not a good day to have been the cause of all this sorrow, destruction, and death -- for as long as it takes him to die from being !@#$ed on, anyway.

SPYGOD laughs. The pain recedes into a speck of memory. Everything goes well and truly black.

And then-

(SPYGOD is listening to Black Celebration (Depeche Mode) and having a Black Death Beer )

3/13/12 - Waiting to Make the First Move

You know, son, I have to say one thing for this plan of mine. For a sloppy, made-on-the-fly piece of !@#$ held together with luck, spit, and wishful thinking, it's actually working out pretty !@#$ well.

(Of course, knowing my luck, as soon as I say something like that the wheels'll go flying off the !@#$ing bus, so maybe I should just stop patting myself on the back, here.)

But let me ask you this, son. Who's got all the pieces of the puzzle sitting in front of him, here at this well-defended location? That would be me.

Who's got the best ever ally to watch my back, being Chinmoku, who owes me big time and isn't about to try and !@#$ me? That would also be me.

And who was lucky enough to have his biggest rival, who could also be the best ally ever where I'm about to go, get his sloppy !@#$ caught trying to get into this camp and arrest yours truly for something I !@#$ing did not, and would never do?

Yes, son. That would be me.

So, to recount? I've got a redoubt that no one's going to mess with. if they do mess with me, I've got a UFO guarded by a psychotic, gun-toting kitty cat, all set for a quick getaway. I've got a kid who can play with dimensions like they're !@#$ing tinkertoys, though he's slowly coming to as of right now. I've got all the information we have on every dimension we know about, though I'm really only interesting in one of them. And I've got Mr. USA, himself, slowly waking up in my tent after what Chinmoku did to him.

(Piece of advice? Do not point a gun at the man. Never a !@#$ing good idea.)

Now, you may have figured out what I don't have, right now. Or rather who. I dropped off Dr. Krwi in Poland, so he and Chinmoku could have a drink and certain, now-unusable talents could be discarded and left for the authorities to find. He did a great job, and I'm seeing to it that the payoff that would have gone to others who proved untrustworthy is going to be split between him, Gosheven, and Chinmoku, but he made it pretty clear that he and I are done. So, off he goes.

Now, I have two other things, here with me. One of them I'm going to refrain from saying anything about, at least for now, because no one has any !@#$ing idea that I have it, much less that it actually exists. But I think it's going to be really !@#$ necessary in a few days, here, so I got it out of my Swiss locker.

Hopefully I will not need it. Knowing my luck, I will.

As for the other thing, I'm working on it a little as I'm making small talk with Simon, and slowly bringing him around. SPYGOD VISION is keeping him awake enough to not wish away Denver, Colorado, but asleep enough to not realize that he could make the whole city just vanish. I figure once he's up and about I'll have enough explaining to do as it is.

(How do you tell someone that you let him sleep in a boobytrapped cryo-chamber for ten years, and no one worked on a way to get him out? I know how I'd feel. And I know what I'd do, too.)

But hopefully this thing I'm working on will help.

What is it? Well, son, I know we've talked about ABWEHR, before. Remember the the night of the Black Pill? All those !@#$ing Nazi Generals who played Russian roulette with their genetic structure just before we rolled into town to cap their stupid, goosestepping !@#$es?

Well, you'll probably remember Wilhelm Ganz, then. Back before he was peddling last-ditch solutions to the cream of the Wehrmacht, he was the guy that was coming up with all those wonderful, cuddly U-Men for the Fatherland. Before and during the War, he found talents, great and small, and got them on board with the Third Reich.

Some he cultivated, some he guided, and some he really worked on. And while some didn't work so well, some turned out to be truly !@#$ing terrifying.

Ask the folks in London, Paris, and Leningrad about that, sometime. I can guarantee you that they have not !@#$ing forgotten what it was like to have living weapons walking down their streets, ripping men, women, and children to pieces and flinging buildings around like cardboard boxes.

All well and good, but just when they thought it couldn't get any better, along comes this one !@#$er who literally shows up out of nowhere, and actually wants to join. 

They called him Thor. He wore shining, silver armor and carried a big !@#$ing hammer. The armor could take a tank shell right to the breadbasket without even knocking him over. The hammer could flatten the tank with a good, solid swing. And he could disappear from one place and re-appear in another, taking certain numbers of men, vehicles, and equipment with him.

Yes, this sounds really !@#$ing familiar. But this guy was no God. In fact, I have it on personal authority from the real Thor that he had nothing to do with that wormy little !@#$.

So who was he? Well, he wasn't being entirely dishonest with the Nazis. His name was Thor -- Thor Jonnson, from Iceland.

Now, mind you, it was Iceland from an alternate timeline, where a certain race of aliens decided to colonize Earth in the 1700's. The conquered humans put up with it for long enough, and then, by the end of the 19th century, a massive, planetary revolt convinced the invaders that Earth was too much trouble to hang onto. But the humans kept the tech, which included some really kick!@#$ weaponry options, bio-engineering for fitter, healthier slaves, and the potential for perpetual cellular regeneration.

So Thor, being something of a runt back in the Iceland of his world, decides to steal one of the aliens' locked up "treasures," which happens to be a dimensional jumper armor. It doesn't have a whole lot of range, just two or three realities, but one of them is !@#$ing empty, and another one is ours.

So you see how this works? He comes here, all superpowered and shiny and really !@#$ing hard to kill, and says "oh yeah, I'm the Thor, God of Thunder. And you know what? This Hitler guy is right."

(And, yes, son, I suspect if he'd materialized in America, first, he'd have been on our side. But I guess that's what happens when would-be technogods touch down in the wrong countries. Wouldn't be the first time that ever happened, and won't be the last.)

So where was I? Oh, yes. Thor: Nazi Thundergod for Hire. Runty SOB proves his mettle on the Eastern front, smashing Commies for Adolph. He demands food and wine and women and parties, and they roll out the carpet for him since he's so !@#$ing cool. And the other U-Men are getting some of the table scraps, so they don't mind too much.

!@#$, for all they know, he is a God. How could you say otherwise? You know that old saw about sufficiently advanced technology and magic, right? And the higher-up Nazis are happy to have their own God on board for when they roll back the Church and replace it with the crazy, Nazi Viking Blood-Religion they were planning to have, instead, so they aren't going to call bull!@#$, either.

And God only knows what Hitler thought.

Well, the party rolls on until D-Day. That's when us Camp Rogers folks hit the ground and start using U-Men for target practice. That's also when the People's Protectors rally and start pushing back. Caught in the squeeze play, the Ubermenschen start dropping like flies.

So who killed Thor? Ironically enough, he did. He was in a battlefield and trying to escape by opening a dimensional portal, but the jumper had been damaged in the fight and didn't quite operate according to the instruction manual. Instead of teleporting itself, and whatever was in it, somewhere else, it teleported only what was in it.

And from the sounds he was making as he went away, I don't think it was somewhere you should be without a really !@#$ good suit of armor.

Of course, he might not be dead. He did have all these life extension things and cellular repair programs. He might be alive and well and trying to get back here. Or he might be a perpetually-repaired lump of flesh, crushed to man-juice on some alternate Earth with really !@#$ed up physics. This is one of those things that I don't know, and, quite frankly, I'm okay with that.

(For now, anyway.)

But, bottom line? The suit fell down to the ground, and the Allies claimed it. After the war, Direction Noir got their hands on it, and it's been sitting in the basement of their museum of crime fashion for !@#$ knows how long, with no one being ballsy enough to try and figure out how to make it work.

And now it's here, and, if I'm right about a certain thing, I may just have the instruction manual...

Yeah, I thought you might start figuring it out, son. You hang around me, long enough, you can start filling in some blanks, right?

But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves, here. Who knows who might be listening?

(And, like I said, the plan is apt to change at any moment...)

Case in point: I didn't really plan to have backup for what happens next, but it looks like fate has intervened in my favor. My other guest is starting to wake the !@#$ up, and I really can't let him sit there on his lonesome for too !@#$ long. He'll start to get all kinds of ideas, and I really don't need them complicating things.

Especially now that he's here to help make certain things a !@#$ of a lot simpler, if he agrees to it. And !@#$ do I hope that he will. Because I have a few errands to run before this plan really kicks into action, and they'll go a lot smoother with the right wingman.

But that means that he and I are going to have to have the mother!@#$er of all talks, right now. And it's not something that I was really all that prepared for. Especially since I think I know what he's going to lay on me, and all I can really say to him in response is that... well...

*sigh*

What do you say? Really? I want to love him. I do. We were friends, once. Brothers in arms. But ever since Berlin he's never loved me back, and I've never gotten a good explanation out of him for that.

Is this where we finally shake hands and make up? Or is he going to insist on arresting me, first, before we go any further? Or...?

...

Well, whatever happens, it happens now. So if you'll excuse me, son, I think we need a little privacy here...?

Thanks.

(SPYGOD is listening to I Want A Lover (Pet Shop Boys) and sharing an Ölvishol Brugghús with an old frenemy)

3/11/12 - And In Spite of the Fight You Sing This Song - Pt. 1

So, I can guess what you're thinking, right about now, and you're absolutely right -- it's not everyday that I have to be involved in a three-way fight to the death in a stolen supernazi UFO.

But then, it's also not every day that I'm carting one of the most !@#$ing powerful entities in existence away from the US Marine base in Guantanamo Bay. It's also not every day that, as expected, certain people in my carefully-picked team turned traitor on me.

And it certainly isn't an everyday occurrence to have the good Lady Gilda actually get !@#$ing boarded while we're still cloaked, courtesy of a stupid little mistake that one of my team made while running a certain, clandestine errand for yours truly.

And yet, here we are, fighting tooth and nail against each other, and against some really scary interlopers. It's Chinmoku, Doctor Krwi, and I against Whisper and Ombra, and all five of us against the Machinemarines, who just canopenered through the roof and started trying to kick everyone's !@#$. 

The good news is that Bee Bee is still flying this crate, and no one's been stupid enough to pull a gun -- yet The bad news is that, given how badly Whisper and that no good, double-crossing Cuban !@#$ are losing, it's probably only a matter of time before one of them !@#$s safety all to !@#$ and decides to let their pistols do the talking.

Not exactly one of my finest !@#$ing hours, here. If I go full on, I'll probably miss someone's face and hit a bulkhead, instead, which would turn my beloved Gilda inside out like a noggin-punched octopus -- killing everyone I need on my side and probably losing my objective forever, to say nothing about stranding me in the middle of the !@#$ing Atlantic.

(Not to mention the fact that, even if they are trying to kick my !@#$, those Marines are still US Marines, and I'll be !@#$ed if I kill a man in that uniform. Ever.)

But the Machinemarines knew I was in here, and planned accordingly. They're packing long, super-heated claws on their power armor, capable of melting through steel like a porn star's !@#$ through a ripe little !@#$hole. They'll kill the ship to get to me, and if they do get to me, well...

So yeah, son. Now is not a really good time to talk about this !@#$. But, since I got nothing better to do, let's talk about how we all got here.

*  *  *

Bottom line? This isn't exactly one of my best plans.

Now, that may come as something of a shock to you to hear me actually !@#$ing say that. But there it is, son. I may have just overreached a little, here. I've had to rely on somewhat unreliable people, have plans within plans that all hinge on people doing exactly what they're told, all while trying to keep my cards so close to my chest they're stuck in my !@#$ing ribcage.

For that, I apologize, but you have to understand the gravity of the situation, here. Not only am I !@#$ing wanted for supposedly shooting the President of the United States of America, but my old outfit is after my fine, gay !@#$ for that very crime, and just about every strategic talent I used to tell where to get off is lining up around the block to !@#$ing bump me off.

Oh, and have I !@#$ing mentioned that I'm trying to save the world, yet again? Just four days and then BOOM happens. Whatever the !@#$ that "Boom" is, anyway.

(No, I don't know. Not exactly. But I have some very nasty !@#$ing suspicions.)

Which means I've had to move a !@#$ of a lot faster than I'd like, and with more desperation than a lovesick kid trying to kiss his childhood sweetheart before her wedding to a !@#$ing caveman. And while I was able to kill a few long-overdue birds with one big !@#$ing stone, back in Cuba, that shouldn't be mistaken for anything resembling the sort of careful, well-laid plan that yours truly is known and celebrated for.

(Stop laughing, son. That is an order.)

So yes, I kidnapped the vampire formerly known as Ernest Hemingway, who used to work for us, and got him to smuggle us into bloodsucker central in Cuba, knowing he'd probably !@#$ us the first chance he got. And I got some really volatile, not completely trustworthy people along for the ride, either because I needed what they could do, or because I needed it to look like I needed what they could do, but really needed them to do something else.

Case in point, Gosheven, who needed to die. Sort of.

You see, people really give metamorphs the short end of the stick. They think it's cute that someone can turn themselves into a bear, or block of ice, or something off that one kid's show. But they really don't consider the whole applications. Even when they're saying "well, can he turn into a !@#$ing dinosaur?" or "You mean the ambassador was really him, all along?" they're still thinking small.

How small? Well, son, let's think about this for a minute, while I'm dodging claws. Say you can control every aspect of your body to the point where you can reshape it into anything you want. Say you can turn yourself into a different animal, or an inanimate object, or even a !@$#ing house, for crying out loud. Say you can increase or decrease your size, change your density, become various chemical compounds, and remain fully conscious throughout the whole thing.

Then how likely is it that a gunshot to the head is actually going to !@#$ing kill you?

And if that's true, then the question isn't "how hard is it to heal yourself from what appears to be a fatal wound," but rather "how hard is it to appear to be brain dead, but actually be carefully timing that healing in such a way that you drop some really useful information on someone so that they barely have any time to act on it, almost guaranteeing they're going to overreact?"

So yes, son, Gosheven's betrayal was all planned. He was the one who contacted the COMPANY to sell me out, on my orders. I made it look like I found out and dealt with him, and they collected his brain-shot !@#$ in the hopes of salvaging what he knew. But come to find out he's only mostly dead, as the Flier's Chief Medical Officer would say, and then he comes to and blabs the cliff notes version of the plan to the guys who are most likely to panic.

But then, he doesn't know the whole plan. He doesn't know it's been changed. The only people that do are Whisper and Chinmoku, because they're going to be getting the object I need while the Doc, Crazyface, Ernest the !@#$, and myself are creating the mother of all distractions in Havana.

It's just that the object isn't in the basement of La Casa de la Sangre. !@#$ing place has no basement, because it's all basement.

No, son. They went somewhere that needed a Flier-sized distraction over !@#$ing Havana to divert attention in case the mission went South.

That would be the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, otherwise known as Gitmo. That would be the location of Detention Camp Zebra, also known as The Z.

And that would be where the most dangerous person in the world was locked up, at least until my people busted him out.

(That's who we're all fighting over, in case you couldn't !@#$ing guess)

(SPYGOD is listening to Fugitive (Pet Shop Boys) and drinking pure fear)

10/24-26/11 The Seven Days of Halloween pt 1

10/24/11
1:30 AM
NEO YORK CITY


She's running. She does this every day, just before bed. She's done it every day since she was in college, and would have done it every day in the Army, too, if they hadn't had that little problem about what she did with her body when she wasn't on duty.

She runs. She's !@#$ good at it, too. Which is why she's kept so far ahead of the person who's trying to snatch her off the street.

Not that he isn't trying hard to catch up with her, though.

But she's confident, this one. Why shouldn't she be? She's a newly-minted Agent of The COMPANY. She just made it through the terrifying uphill slog that is Hell Month. She's got her uniform and her office, and has been posted on The Flyer as a scheduling assistant to SPYGOD, himself.

(It might have been the way she kicked him, square in the alien apparatus, that day he came down and offered to give them the day off if the five Hell Month survivors could take him down. Or maybe it's her excellent organizational skills? Like the song says, 'It's no use asking / You'll get no reply.')

She's crawled through things you don't want to know about. She's done things no one should ever have to with people, places, and things that most folks outside certain government agencies even know exist. She's earned her place in the organization a dozen times over, and while she hasn't made her bones, yet (that accident in Hell Month did not count) she's sure she's going to make it, soon.

Her name is Agent Sue F. Armatrading, and she is not afraid.

Which is why, when she realized she was being followed on her after-Midnight jog, she did not use her communicator to call for help, or flag down a fellow citizen or policeman. Which is why she simply upped her already-considerably pace and changed her route a little, hoping that her would-be attacker wasn't in the mood to leap through alleys full of garbage cans, cardboard boxes, and sleeping Free.

Which is also why, once she discovered that her tail wasn't going to be shaken so easily, she thanked God for the gun in her runners bag, and decided on a good spot to turn around, whip it out, and start exercising some authority on the !@#$

She slows down, now, making ready to pull the gun out, spin around, and put on her game face. She really hopes it's just some rapist !@#$ high on meth. It'd be nice to blow some holes in someone and not have to worry about too much paperwork.

But she's made one mistake, and it isn't until it's too late that she realizes this. She'd been focusing on the visible threat. She made no allowances for other, unseen factors.

Like the one that's just snuck up beside her, pressed a certain nerve cluster on the side of her neck, and turned her off like a handheld blender.

She falls down, almost insensate. For some reason she focuses on her gun clattering on the street. That and the voice of the person who dropped her.

"Get her back to the Farm," the person says. (My god, that voice...) And then she's blacked out.

Her name is Agent Sue F. Armatrading, and while she still is not afraid, she's more than a little concerned. Not about how she's going to get out of this one, but how she's going to explain it to her boss...


10/25/11
5:14 PM

THE FLYER - SPYGOD'S OFFICE

TRANSCRIPT BEGINS


MYRON: Sir? You asked to see me?


SPYGOD: Yes I !@#$ did. Five minutes ago.

MYRON: I came as soon as I could, sir.

SPYGOD: You should have come yesterday, Myron. I may have to introduce you to Mr. Left foot again.

MYRON: Oh please, sir. Not that again. I just had these pants washed-

SPYGOD: Come in, sit down, shut the !@#$ up.

MYRON: Yes sir. I mean, sorry sir. I'm sitting down and shutting up now.

SPYGOD: Good. Coffee? Tea? Beer? Whiskey?

MYRON: Coffee, sir. Please.

SPYGOD: My god, man. You need to watch that habit. Drinking that !@#$ black heroin is going to !@#$ kill you faster than being skull!@#$ by a jackhammer.

MYRON: ... I'll have a beer, then, sir.

SPYGOD: Good man. Hope you like Thai.

MYRON: Learning to love it, sir.

SPYGOD: So, Underman. How's life as a reformed would-be supercriminal now working for the best spy agency in the government working out for you?

MYRON: It's done wonders for my self respect, sir.

SPYGOD: Yes, so I've heard. You've fit in well, you're doing a better job than I'd hoped. I understand you've even managed to get yourself !@#$ laid for a change.

MYRON: Um... yes, sir. Several times in fact. How did you... oh, wait. Never mind, sir. I keep forgetting. 'SPYGOD knows all.'

SPYGOD: !@#$ straight, and don't you forget it. Now. Reason I called you in here. I may have a lead on where GORGON went when they vanished down the !@#$ plughole. If I'm right, they're in the central subduction zone.

MYRON: But that means they're...

SPYGOD: Yes. They are.

MYRON: Oh. Oh !@#$.

SPYGOD: Which means we've got our work cut out for us. How soon can you get me a working plan of attack based on the original Underman's maps of the planet?

MYRON: Give me a week?

SPYGOD: How about yesterday?

MYRON: Yesterday. Right. I'll get right on it, sir.


10/26/11
THE B.U.I.L.D.I.N.G.


Got an interesting call from Director Straffer, up at DAMOCLES, around 9 in the AM. I'm still in The B.U.I.L.D.I.N.G, recovering from the party Myron's debriefing on Inner Earth turned out to be. Also still tangled up with the three lovely people I only half-remembered coming home with after all that.

He asks if he can come down to share it with me, as I am clearly in no shape to come up and see him. I ask him how the happy unholy living !@#$ he could possibly know that, and he laughs that annoying laugh of his and says he knows a thing or two, himself.

Sure, come on down, I say. I figure he's going to get in one of those swanky 80's-as-seen-in-the-60's rocket jets they go to Deep Ten and back in. But no, he !@#$ appears in the middle of my bedroom, all dapper and refined like he's been up a lot longer than I've been alive.

Of course I !@#$ shoot at him. You don't need to know where I had the gun hidden. He just laughs and turns around to regard the hole in the wall.

"Holographic telepresence," he explains: "I can beam on down anywhere with enough cell phone towers to triangulate a signal. Either that or use a nice communicator like what you've got there, under the... um, whoever that is on your left."

How lovely. I get to have my swinging bachelor pad invaded by a !@#$ hologram because my !@#$ cell phone is too !@#$ good for it's own good. I make a note to deal with that later, preferably with a very large gun.

But he's got a point to this little invasion of my oh-so-precious privacy, Director Straffer does. Once I have METALMAID show the ladies to the door, he uses some of that super-high-tech holographic tomfoolery to show me what I at first think is a flashback to the Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, but is actually realtime 3-D sonar imagery from one of my COMPANY subs. The Thunderball, in fact.


"We found the dive recorder," he explains: "It was thrown well clear of the explosion. I was worried that, once the enemy spacecraft was dealt with, it might have been melted, too. But it turns out it was well outside the blast radius."

I watch, stunned, as the sub's sophisticated sensors show me a spacecraft design I have never seen before. From the pictures the research vessel had taken, it looked like a stereotypical flying saucer, but that was just from the top. It actually looks like a giant screw, with the business end driven into the sea floor.

The rest of the show's the depressing thing I was expecting: DAMOCLES agents swarm out to meet it and are annihilated by something the sensors can't quite make out. Once that something finds its way towards the ship, the agent in charge calls in a Code Triple Black. The rest is history, and a wide, long swath of destroyed seabed.

"One thing of interest," Straffer says, sitting next to me in the bed, somehow: "You see that mark on the top of the craft? The one that looks like a sideways 6? That looks remarkably similar to a concept-glyph in Catorese."

"Catorese," I repeat, having beer number four: "Remind me why that's !@#$ significant, Straffer. I'm not drunk enough to remember, yet."

"The Cators are the alien race that claim to be the oldest, most civilized, and most well-traveled out of all the ones we've made official contact with."

"Okay. So this is theirs? Swell. Let's !@#$ 'em."

"I've talked with them, (REDACTED). This is not one of their ships. They say that the glyph is similar to their writing, but is actually more in keeping with something they based their language on, millions of years ago."

"So this ship... might be something made by someone even older than they are?"

"Or, it could be another race that took influence from a similar source. Bottom line is that they don't know who they are. And that is also extremely disturbing to me."

"I bet they're !@#$ lying."

"They don't lie, SPYGOD. They actually can't mentally bring themselves to do it. That's one of the reasons I like dealing with them."

"How do you know they're not lying about not being able to lie?" I ask. It's a fair question, but it gets me the mother of all withering looks.

"Well, I thought you should know," he says, getting up to go: "We now have an answer. Maybe not a full one, maybe not a good one, but at least we now know what happened and why my men felt the need to sacrifice your submarine, and themselves."

"Hey, don't go away !@#$ mad," I say: "Can you holograph yourself a beer?"

"No. I can't drink."

"Can't or don't?"

"Yes," he answers, smiling: "Oh, and that glyph? It means a lot of things in different contexts, but in this instance we think it means 'Long Range Observation.' Observing what, I wonder?"

I'm about to tell him I'll come up when I know, but then he's gone. Sneaky !@#$.


(SPYGOD is listening to 7Rain: Ghost (Front 242) and having a large bottle of Deathly Pale Ale)