I should probably come up with a proper title for this. Look, this story's gathering some weird internal momentum and these strange ideas keep coming to me and, well, it might be around for a while. You have been warned. Superhero stuff ahead...
Shrugging, I turn to the others.
And the breath catches in my throat.
Our last jaunt into the wider alterni-verse had been an arduous one. The Vile, an insectoid proxy of The Shining Legions, who were themselves avatars of the only partially knowable Gods of Entropy, had laid a hold on Parallel 17 that had proved difficult to break. Our standard practice of seeking out the parallel’s local super-beings and enlisting their aid had simply not been viable. Most of them had already been executed by the Vile’s eumenes-like enforcers long before our arrival. Only Mother Miracle, her alter ego forgotten and abandoned in an insane asylum for fifteen years, had been of any use to us. Even then, taking down the Vile’s palace-hive had been tough. While it had been child’s play for me to inspire the citizens of the Chattering City to rise up against their inhuman masters, bearing the guilt of so many of their deaths… That is a different thing altogether.
And not just for me, it would seem.
“That was…” The Steel Sorceress shudders. There are spots of blood and dirt on her armour; her face is lined with pain. “We…”
“We’re not doing it like that again.” His voice cold and hard, Commander Destiny takes a step towards me. I do not flinch, although I would have not all that long ago. Fighting the War Eternal across the alterni-verse tends to change you. With studied impassivity, I return the stare of a man who can level mountains. Like the Sorceress, the Commander’s face is drawn and pale. His uniform consists of a short jacket fitting tightly across an even tighter blue and white bodyglove. On anyone else it’s an ensemble that would look absurd, but on the Commander it just… works. Now, of course, it’s all dirty and worn, stained with sweat and grime and the bodily fluids of a thousand insect stormtroopers. The jacket is a deep red. I can’t tell if there’s blood on it, but I suspect there is. He’s suffering. We all are, but him more than the rest of us.
The Commander is a paragon, a man imbued with immense power and just as great nobility. He is a living symbol – of hope generally, although I have seen on other Earths versions of him that have been twisted, bent out of shape and made monstrous by the whims of fate, the cold caprice of the laws of possibility. Here, though, he is just Dan Dalton, a mid-westerner who, as a teenager, stumbled upon – and then into – a top secret government nuclear experiment and, instead of doing what any sensible teenager would do in such circumstances and die instantly, woke up in a Nebraska hospital five weeks later with the physique and powers of a god. Funny, that. I remember that Einstein quote about God not playing dice with the universe. If there’s anything the last few months has taught me it’s that there is no God and the universe just keeps rolling and rolling and rolling until something interesting happens.
But the Commander isn’t just interesting. He is truth and honour and justice and all the other ideals that are hanging perilously in the balance in this dirty, shitty war.
And now he’s angry at me.
(To be continued? What do you think?)