Who Watches The Watchmen IC

[Lunaramblings]

The being once known to an ungrateful world as Doctor Manhattan floats above a distant world. A world that has been remade. A world that didn't exist twenty years ago. This being... this God ponders the infinite.

It is twenty years in the future. I am standing above a world created in my own vision. A sea of infinite possibilities.

It is twenty years in the past. I am disintegrating a good man.

It is two years in from then, I am seeing the world rally, New York City, once considered a great city, now little more than a Necropolis. Men move through the streets, finishing a job long ago started.

It is one year after Adrian destroyed a city to save a world. Rorschach proved to have outsmarted the world’s smartest man. Adrian has disappeared. But he is not gone.

It is twenty years since Adrian made his sacrifice. And something must be done. The world is approaching a terrible darkness. A pale rider is in motion. I will return. There will be those you will stand against the darkness.

It is 51 seconds since I looked at my new creation. I have a vision once more of my future . I am killing a man in the snow. I thought I already did that.

I hold a photograph in my hand. Dan, Laurie, Myself, Rorschach. Times were simple once. There is no time. There is only infinite definitions of now.

If you would like to join this RP please PM me or Post in the OOC thread that has already been established. http://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?p=30428966#post30428966

 

[ChasNicollette]

"Jung tells us of recurring archetypes.

Of little bits and pieces of the collective unconscious of Mankind cropping up here and again in the ebb and flow of the psyche. Of elements flitting from one dream to the next, sometimes unchanging from mind to mind to mind.

Sometimes these archetypes are more literal than others, and a man who was one thing to one generation can have a second coming in the next.

But archetypes are like dreams. And dreams are like inkblots.

They only have meaning when Man ascribes them meaning. They only have meaning if we give them meaning.

And what could it mean, what could it possibly mean, if the archetype that recurs is one of unrelenting, uncompromising, nigh-paranoiac, all-but-psychotic conservatism, Objectivism, and justice?

One could theorise that each generation of humanity receives the heroes that it deserves.

But that would only be one possible meaning..."

-from a letter to the editor of The New Frontiersman, author unknown.​

********​

Confrontation: 10-13-2005. 11:47 PM.

The parking garage was cold with the October night.

The light of a billboard spilled into the garage from across the street, purples and golds, and the light seemed warm. It lent no warmth at all, and even as it advertised a perfume-- XX: Onescore After --neither did it improve the smell of the place.

The parking garage smelled of blood and cordite and urine and burning rubber.

More so, now.

Urine ran down the Knot Top's leg as he ran, arms pinwheeling in a most ungraceful fashion as he zigged and zagged between the parked cars. Somewhere in the distance, he could hear sirens, and as he snuffled breath through his bloodied nostrils, he found himself praying that those sirens would get closer, faster.

He dove between two antique electric Buicks as he glanced desperately, over his shoulder, behind him, trying to see if she was following.

He didn't see her.

He turned his gaze ahead of him and she was there and he skidded to a halt there between those cars, panic strickening his face. "Oh... oh God."

"Wrong gender for god," she opined, her voice flat, dull, monotone, uncompromising even in the face of inflection.

She wore black.

A black trench-coat, a black fedora, black gloves. She wore a black suit of a feminine cut, with black slacks and a black tie set in stark contrast against the white of her shirt. Her black hair fell around her face in a choppy a-line. And her face...

Her face was black on white. Black, eerie, oozing, shapeshifting splotches on the whitest of backgrounds, coal against chalk, obsidian against pearl, soot upon snow. Always the splotches were symmetrical, but never were they the same twice.

Her gloved hands flexed.

The Knot Top let out a bloodcurdling scream, though the blood running down his face did not curdle, and he drew back to hurl a punch at her face, that maddening face, let the punch fly...

Implacable, unimpressed, she blocked this punch with the knuckles of her own fist and the Knot Top felt his hand crunch and crumple and his bloodcurdling scream died in his throat, turned into a gurgle.

"Arrogant to assume own apotheosis," she mused. "Not goddess, either."

The Knot Top reached for his belt, fumbled for a gun, yanked this out of his belt, made to level this at her face.

Her hand shot out, lightning dressed in black, grabbed his thumb, twisted it...

...bones ground nastily, joints popped out, the thumb sundered...

"AAaaaAAAGHH!" the Knot Top found his voice again.

"Stupid," she instructed. "Should have tried gun first."

She yanked the gun out of his grasp and twirled it in her grasp, holding it by the barrel with the butt jutting outwards. She cracked it into his jaw and he staggered back, one, two, steps, half-crouched, didn't fall.

Casually, she removed the clip from the gun, pocketed the clip, tossed the gun away. "Still wouldn't have worked. But should have tried gun first. More efficient."

"Buh, buh," the Knot Top mumbled, "bitch."

"Hurm," she mused, and then reached out with one of those impossible lunge-quick hands, and took ahold of the Knot Top's top-knot.

She yanked him by the hair and slammed his face into the passenger-side window of the Buick to his right, slammed his face into the window and through it, shattering the glass and covering his countenance with a hundred tiny shallow bleeding cuts.

He sputtered, choked, sank to his knees.

All the time in the world, she reached in through the busted window and unlocked the car door. And then she hauled the door open hard and slammed it into the kneeling Knot Top's face, cronch.

The Knot Top folded over backwards in a most ungraceful fashion, dead to the world.

"Language," she scolded, voice unwavering.

Tyres squealed in the near distance, getting hurriedly closer. Burning rubber.

"Not god," she mused, putting her hands into the pockets of her coat as she walked calmly in the direction of those squealing tyres. "Not goddess. Wrathful, though."

The car screamed into view, barreling down on her like all the hounds of Hell.

The car was blue. The fluorescent lights of the garage glared wildly on its windshield, its navy paintjob.

(The driver was wide-eyed and drug crazed. Probably had dipped into the same stash of cruel white powder he'd been trying to sell when she'd interrupted.

The passengers seemed equally enthused.

The engine roared, far louder than an electric engine should have. Illegal modifications.)

She unbuttoned her coat, and strolled calmly towards a round concrete support column.

(The driver's hands were white-knuckled on the wheel as he angled the vehicle to intercept.)

She turned to face them, reaching back behind herself, under the coat, 'round her back. She faced the car with the column at her back.

("Gonna crush her like a gnat," the Knot Top behind the wheel seethed, spittle foaming 'round his lips, "like a dog, bitch is a dog, bitch is roadkill."

His foot shoved hard towards the floor.)

She swung her hands out from behind her back. And in each black gloved hand was, gleaming, polished, a gun that wasn't a gun.

The gun in her right hand had a grappling hook. The gun in her left hand had a cannister, long and cylindrical, there instead of a barrel.

(The driver frowned in confusion. "Wait. Shit. What?")

And there, there, she lifted her left foot up and back and planted it against the column and pushed off and she launched and she ran she ran she ran towards the car...

("COME GET IT!" the driver roared, unwilling to look a gift horse in the mouth...)

The car reached her. She reached the car.

Her first stride planted her cool black polished shoe on the front bumper. Her second stride planted her cool black polished shoe on the hood.

Guns held out to each side, she dove up and over the windshield and rolled in a tuck along the roof of the vehicle, her slender frame slithering neatly between one of the over-hanging lights and the cool cool blue metal of the car.

She slid down the rear windshield, dove off of the trunk, rolled again when she hit the ground, bounded immediately to her feet, whirled to face the way she'd come.

Deprived of a target, the car's insatiable momentum carried it headlong into that selfsame support column. CRONCH.

The driver's head hit the windshield, as did the passenger's, the glass spidering but not shattering. The backseat riders were spared this ignominy, but still were jostled, slammed into the seats in front of them. All were crumpled, some were groaning, some were not conscious.

The rear windshield was still intact.

"Good manufacturing," she noted. "Best things still American-made."

She leveled the grappling gun at the rear windshield. "Still. Omelettes."

She pulled the trigger, and with a whump and a hiss the gleaming metal hook launched, punching a hole through the rear windshield and burying itself in the back of the driver's seat headrest, narrowly missing the crumpled form of the Knot Top in the driver's-side backseat.

Her gloved thumb nudged a secondary catch, and the hook retracted with a whizz and a clonk, the cable slithering back into the gun.

She walked up to the hole she'd made in the rear windshield, and placed the other gun against it, the cannister-bearing gun. And on this, too, she pulled the trigger...

...with a fwooooosh, a sickly green gas began billowing into the vehicle, filling up its interior.

One of the Knot Tops within stirred, bleary, fighting to stay conscious, though the gas was dragging him back down again...

"Whuh-why?" he whimpered. "Whuh-why? Just. Doin' business. Just business."

"'Business,'" she hmphed. "Have issues with illegal importation of Colombian merchandise. Unlicenced. Very bad. Bad business."

This Knot Top dragged in a lungful, and shook his head, as he started to fully fade. "Knockout gas."

"Six of one," she agreed. And this weapon, too, had a secondary catch on it. And her thumb flicked this catch.

It sparked.

And the gas went up like the fuse on a V.V.N. Night firework, and the car's interior became a fireball.

She dropped back, avoiding the billow of fire that escaped the rear windshield's rupture, and then she turned and strode away as the Knot Tops awakened rudely to die burning and screaming and cursing.

"Cars never explode," she pondered, "like in decadent motion pictures."

She got quite a ways away before the car exploded behind her, the flames consuming the gas tank and becoming conflagration...

...she grunted as a wing mirror skidded past her foot and caromed to a shattered halt against the tyre of a late-model electric Toyota.

"Hurm," she noted, standing corrected. "Almost never."

The sound of the explosion echoed in that place, and eventually the echoes cleared, and she could hear that the sirens from before were closer now. Much, much closer.

"Tempus fugit," she decided, as she holstered the gas gun behind her at her waist and made for the stairs with the grappling gun still at the ready.

She pounded up the stairs, arms pumping, breath seething in the skin of her face.

One floor. Two. Three. Five.

Roof.

She sprinted out into the October night, never tiring, never slowing, and a moon blossomed sickly and gold above in the light pollution of The City That Never Sleeps. Along with the moon, there blossomed the glaring light of a police helicopter, its spotlight chasing her across the rooftop.

"Freeze!" one of its uniformed occupants bellowed into a bullhorn. "VIGILANTE! You are under arrest and you will be fired upon unless you stand down now!"

She reached the edge of the lot's roof, and with a bound landed in a crouch on the stone barrier that encircled that roof, her unbuttoned coat billowing around her like a cloak.

"'Stop in the name of The Law,'" she parodied, crouching there on the edge of oblivion, aiming the grappling gun.

The spotlight found her, framing her with pale light around her darkness. She did not even glance at its blinding source.

"Never was keen," she mused, as whump-hiss, the grapnel speared out into the night, found purchase, and she swung, "on Keene."

The spotlight could not find her again.

She was gone.

********​

"What Veidt did for Mankind seems perhaps a kindness, but it was not a solution, not by any means.

One cannot halt Entropy. One can perhaps delay it for a time, but one cannot halt the inevitable.

Perhaps what Veidt did was not even a delay. Thermodynamics tells us that the more complex an ordered system becomes, the more likely it is to break down. And Veidt's 'godsend' has turned the entire world, nigh-infinitely complex, into one single ordered system.

Breakdown is inevitable. Perhaps now it is even accelerated.

Entropy is coming.

The end is still nigh."

-from a letter to the editor of The New Frontiersman, author unknown.​

 

[ChasNicollette]

Contemplation: 10-13-2005. 1:02 PM.

She sat on a bench in the park.

The day was bright, though cold. The sun lent little warmth, if any, like an odourless neon sign.

The earbuds were tiny, but they were tangible. They filled her ears. Aggravating.

Still, less cumbersome than other models of headphone.

She could hear the voice of the man who had tried to conquer the world by saving it, had tried to rebuild the manse of humanity on his own infirm foundation. He sounded calm, almost cheerful. These had been happier times for him, when this had been recorded.

She sat on a bench in the park in the October afternoon light and she listened, the mp8 player cradled in her lap, her fingers woven around it in a position approximating za-zen.

Her name was Alisa, though she preferred the first initial, simply "A," and she was a subdued sort of beautiful. Like she could have been a fascinating sort of beautiful but had subverted this somehow, deliberately. Her brown hair was all but shaven, her eyes were dark and full of depth, and while her mouth was not entirely unshapely, that mouth barely moved. She did not smile.

A sat on the bench, and she listened.

Movement came to life beside her, and fingers plucked the earbud from her right ear, her right hand shot up in an eyeblink and clamped around the wrist of the hand from which sprouted the offending fingers...

The college student's eyes were wide as he looked at her hand wrapped 'round his wrist. Not out of genuine fear, why would he be afraid of such a skinny little thing-- nigh-emaciated, she looked --as this? His eyes were wide out of surprise.

He was not a threat. Too placid and flaccid to be a threat.

"Uninvited physical contact," she suggested.

"Right," he mumbled. "Sorry. I just. I recognised you. From Cooper's philosophy class? You were the girl who took him to task on transhumanism last week, I didn't think anyone had the balls to stand up to that old jack-ass."

A's lip twitched. "Ovaries."

Her hand released his wrist.

The boy laughed faintly, rubbing that wrist, adjusting his book-satchel on his shoulder and regrouping, perhaps, for another attempt.

"Right," he nodded. "Ovaries, not balls. My bad."

She wore oversized clothes, emphasising her scrawniness, minimising the shape of her figure still further. Again, perhaps an intentional affectation. She wore black.

He wore clothes, t-shirt and longsleeved button-down over it, blue jeans, Chaz Taylor running shoes, all screaming "average handsome collegiate male." The t-shirt advertised the recent "Curse of The Black Freighter" film, commercial success. Dreary.

"Cooper," A mused, eyes drooping to half-lid with her disinterest, "exhibited willful ignorance. Found this irritating."

"Heh," he chuckled. "Yeah, same here."

He gestured to the earbud that dangled at her side. "So, uh, anything good? Vintage Pale Horse? Maybe something newer, peg you for an indie rocker..."

A glanced down at the earbud like she'd forgotten it was there. "Books on tape. (Anachronistic term.)"

He blinked. "Seriously? Catching up on Cliff's Notes for class?"

A's inexpressive pouty lip quirked for an instant. "Veidt Method. Read by author."

He actually took a step back at that one, so great was his incredulity, so wide was his grin. "Oh, man. The king of the snake-oil salesmen, right? Self-enlightenment, athleticism, intellect, even healing... how that guy made such a mint selling this stuff, I have no idea. I tried reading it once, I couldn't make it through the first chapter, so much poppycock."

"Read print book sixty times," A replied, indicating herself. "Copy wore out. Replaced with downloaded version. Twentieth listen-through."

The boy's eyes went wide, and this time there was a little bit of fear in them, where before there had been only astonishment. "You're, uh, a real devotee, huh? But how can you spend so much time on something you know is fruitless? It's just... it's hollow fiction, it's moneygrubbing, it's not real."

"M'Iver," A replied.

"What?" he frowned.

"Now-vintage television programme," A explained, methodically but not patiently. "Angus M'Iver. Adventurer. Eschewed firearms for improvised escapes utilising household items found at hand, cunning, intelligence, luck. Source of vernacular terms 'm'iverism,' and 'm'ivered.' Sometimes made explosives, similar concoctions. Producers felt providing full recipes for these asking for trouble. Children blowing up own houses. Glazed over processes. Omitted ingredients."

College lad frowned, his brow tightening with the force of his puzzlement. "You're saying that Veidt... sabotaged his own self-improvement programme?"

"Pseudo-egalitarian," A nodded. "Elitist. Would not provide public with secret of own success, arm common man against himself, would keep full potency for himself and those under his control. Would consider alternative to be like handing children Anarchist's Cookbook."

"That makes even less sense," the boy shook his head. "Knowing that it's got built-in flaws? Why would you still listen to it so devotedly?"

A looked at him coolly for a moment, before plucking her dangling earbud back from where it dangled and moving it back towards her ear. "Finding the secret ingredients. Closing the gap. Turning his weapon back on him, figuratively."

The boy saw that his chance was fading, that she was about to shut him out again... he was desperately bewildered by her but, typical male, was unwilling to admit that he'd been blanked and bested. "Wait, wait, hey. Um."

She paused. She looked at him.

"There's a party," he mumbled, "in Baruch Hall, on Friday night? I, uh, don't have a date. I thought you might want to... maybe... come along with me?"

A sniffed faintly. "Ineffectual gathering. Noisy, malodourous. Fraternity brothers and airheads indulging in Katies and qualuudes and coke. No. Not looking to socialise."

This, more than anything else she'd said so far, or perhaps on top of everything else she'd said so far, seemed to mystify and stymie the lad entirely. He turned a dark red, and his hands became frustrated fists at his sides. "If, uh, you're 'not looking to socialise,' why even bother coming outside where people can find you? If-if-if you're so dead opposed to interacting with fellow human beings, why not just stay at-at-at the top of your ivory tower?"

A shook her head. "Avoiding dormitory room-mate. Has a boy over. Don't like boys."

The boy took a moment to absorb this data, as it had stopped him dead in his tracks. "Oh. You're a... you're a gay woman? But I thought... I thought... you seemed steadfastly Objectivist in class, when you were dressing down Cooper. And... and Objectivists don't like gays. ...right?"

"Irrelevant," A harrumphed, and rose to her feet, and turned to walk away from him. "Like 'love of skyscrapers.'"

She walked away from him, and he stood there staring after her, red-cheeked and goggle-eyed. He shook his head slowly, uncomprehending.

"Weird-ass. Psycho. Bitch."

A grunted to herself, rolled her eyes as she popped that earbud back into place at long last. "Willful ignorance. Irritating."

 

[thewhiterabbit8]

The camera had haunted her dreams stealing away any privacy she might have imagined as a child. Here deep blue eyes became lost in the lens of the camera she could hear the click, click as the tape was played.

She could feel that warm feeling spread in her stomach that told her she was going to enjoy this one. Why should she not she knew the man well she had been only one of many he had even tried to invite her to one of those late night meetings. He had tried so hard only to give up when he found out whose sister she was. Slowly she focused her mind like a laser an cast it into the either of the internet. She searched millions of addresses in the blink of an eye find to a bondage torture.

A woman came into focus kneeling next to a man in a shallow pool of water naked. The man hidden behind a black hood applied small electrified spheres to her nipple singing the small hairs that surrounded them. “This is the Dark Dungeon, are latest guest is columnist Samantha water a feminist whore who does not know her place on her knees at the feet of man” he announce like some sort of freak show headman or car salesman as if torturing a woman was an everyday event for him, and maybe it was.

The man in a black jump suit pulled the rusty zipper down slow carful not to catch himself in the metal teeth the red light that bathed both of them revealed a sweaty but well formed body. The woman was hysterical but made not a sound when he took out the ball gage from her mouth.

“Take it you cunt” demanded the man slapping her hard enough to draw blood with his well manicured nails. A phantom knock then another before the man slowly turned around. BUt he saw nothing, nothing but Emily hall slowly taking sliding of her blouse in front of the camera. Static the camera picture seemed to jerk to the right. “Naught, Naughty Sanders you know you should treat women with respect would you do that to you’re mother”. Another phantom knock sander moved even more sloly his eyes falling first on an aged woman. He moved quickly with the knife from his belt turned untying Samantha waters with a few cuts.

She moved towards the screen, first her hands appeared on the other side grasping the sides of the TV. Then her face began pushing through the screen the man was wetting the floor like a garden hose. “You’re not afraid of some little cunt I mean a big strong man like you”. The man again in pushing aside his fear grabbed a wrench swinging it wild striking everything but the TV her astral form peeling back like smoke. Emily smiled watching him trip over his own cloths and fall down on his face breaking his nose. “You should not be watching me you should be watching you’re little toy” he looked up just in time to see the TV crash onto his face.

She was thrown was back in the studio the pre-taped striptease was just coming to an end her body covered in sweat. The next day another scum bag would be found dead in a pool of his own blood never to hurt another woman. She stripped out of her cloths and climbed into bed the next night she had to be Ethan again. It was a part she knew better the any other. Tomorrow her dead brother was going to be meeting with hundreds of men just like the one she had helped kill. She licked her lips reading the surface thoughts she would find a whole knew crop of victims for her late night entertainment.

Tomorrow was another day tonight she could enjoy herself she pulled out a magazine one from her own publishing. The other was a woman’s trainer she smiled it was like sweet and sour but she would have to suffer. Emily would have to take a husband one capable of performing her wifely duties that meant not throwing up. Now she just had to reprogram her brain to receive the same pleasure she did from seeing a woman’s form transplanted onto a man’s.

The party was being held in the Opal Opera a building that would be torn down to make way for Glories now home office. The building had stood for a hundred years but had only been open to the public for one night. Many thought she chose it for the cheap property values it was a protest art is not for the rich but belongs to the people. As Emily she wanted to open it up and perform on the stage, but as Ethan she had to knock it down for her news empire.

Ethan her dead brother had proved more useful as a corpse then he ever had as a man. “Ethan I can’t believe it you have taken the publishing world by storm I mean it was genius using body paint and stickies to get around the morality clause” Ethan Hall publisher of Glory government propaganda and pinup magazine. He smiled his old friend Robert Drake a self proclaimed coinsure of women wine and world politics.

“Well you just have to understand the Morality commission and certain members tastes then it becomes as easily to manipulate a senator as it does an other man” she said rubbing her nose with her thumb it took a good three weeks to find what each of the five member liked. She had to stick her hand deeply in the filth and decay of the city, even selling her own body and soul to get the information.

How had she come so far gone so astray from the small girl who had dreamed of becoming a ballerina? After the death of her father her brother it took her only days to assume his identity. She smiled it had happened at the tender age of six before anything in her body had really changed now and days it took a team to keep her secret. Ethan had not become the good person he was meant to be, but Mesmer waited in the wings to right his wrongs.

The Ballinger Ball was the social even of the year hundreds of top government officials and leaders of the business community attended out of spite or to secure there wealth gained through misdeed of centuries past. To the public it was an overprice charity auction, to the rich and famous it was an open auction for the government. “I hear you are thinking of entering politics can I count on you’re support for the new Colossus super weapon”. IT was three stargeneral Ballinger the son of congressman Ballinger head of the committee responsible for the out of control military spending.

“You know I have already sold the land for the factory, but I am surprised you have not got you’re fourth star”. The general had reached three stars at only 35 something that would have been impossible without his fathers support. He smiled and offered her a drink that she declined better to be on her toes. “Well stars are not everything there giving me control over the colossus program and all forces stationed overseas”.

a few minutes latter she changed her mind and took the drink the man was a fool, but one with powerful connections. The man was a pig with three mistresses none of which he left satisfied, why look for more chicks when you could not even satisfy the hen at home. In publich he was a happily married man smoke and mirrors and she had Miss Abadine a woman while a little aged knew more about people and what pleased them then her husband ever would. If only he knew the things she had done with her in the dark. “I was wondering if you could set me up with miss monkey wrench I would like to see what you had to airbrush out”.

If only she was Mesmer she could show this man what it was like to be on the other end of his exploration of the female species. She could show him the empty feeling of lonliness, the empty promises. She could show him what it was like to be without power to be in love without feeling love in return.

She wanted to throw up into her own mouth but that would look weird what a pity such a sexual intelligent woman ending up with a pig like him. She had to play it cool Ethan was a respected smut peddler with a womanizing reputation. “If only you’re sister was not such a nun I would go after her as well”. She pushed past him rushing for the balcony. She threw up hard over the side.

She slipped into the private elevator with her silent man servant Bernard stripping of her outer shell. “Another tough night” he asked in his solemn voice like the gravel through a grinder. How easy it would be to become Mesmer then make her nightly broadcast on her pirated channel. She smiled easily slipped into Ethan’s casual wear, tomorrow she could become Emily again.

No one had wondered why they had never caught the twins together in so many years but they were rich and the rich asked questions only when it benefited them.. “Maybe I should fake my death” she mused but would any one Miss Emily Hall she was just one of a million cunts. She picked up the paper “Industrialist found alone and naked in condemned building of a broken skull” she turned over the paper nope it was cherished philanthropist Aden Thane found dead of heart attack in hunting lodge. The only thing he was hunting was a good, time how deep were the papers in the pockets of the rich.

 

[LuckyVic]

Bright lights, big city.

This is and has been one of the larger cities in the world for many years. During the day it looks like any other city, but at night is when the sickos come out. Night is when the people needed to be watched.

What most of them didn't know is that they were being watched. Even now on top of one of the older still standing buildings a dark figure stood looking down. To him there was no darkness, he saw everything as clearly as if it were daylight. Benefits of having a multi-optic lenses built into the helmet on his head.

To most of the people, he was a rumor, a story told to young kids to stick to the straight and narrow. That the Nightwatch was always watching.

The Criminal underworld was also learning this. In fact they much rather have him confront them then Rorschach. At least when they dealt with Nightwatch they knew they had would come out alive.

Finally the shadow moved and turned it's head. "Did you really have to do that much damage Rorschach?" he said noticing the vigillantee that was trying to sneak up on him.

 

[ChasNicollette]

"The art of the copycat walks a fine line.

The art of the copycat walks a sword's edge.

What may begin as heartfelt homage, as loving tribute to that which once inspired, may in turn become counterfeiting, plagiarism, self-absorbed rip-off artistry. Like alchemy of yore, only a careful balancing of ingredients and timing and focus spells the difference between gleaming gleaming gold and cold poisonous lead.

It's a tricky thing. It's a tricky thing to find the heart and soul of that which one idolises and hold that heart and soul suspended within your own matrices, keep it held within you, held in awe, without letting it be contaminated by your own innate corruption.

It's a tricky thing. It might be impossible.

That you cannot touch greatness, cannot bear it close, without getting the slippery oils of your fingerprints upon it.

But perhaps that's part of the deal. Part of the passing of the torch.

You can only properly receive the torch from them who pass it if you promise to carry it higher while it's in your grasp.

Dan Dreiberg, inheritor of the mantle of Nite Owl from Hollis Mason, was such a torchbearer. He elevated the Nite Owl legacy to an entirely new operating level, and did so receiving Mason's blessing.

(The accomplishments of either Silk Spectre are dubious at best, if certain Tijuana Bibles are to be believed, but this is neither here nor there. Inarguably, the second Spectre was an active presence in the events of October/November 1985, which makes her an historical figure by association if by nothing else.)

Unfortunately, not every hero's legacy has received such a benefit from its ersatz successors. To wit: the inimitable Rorschach.

Walter Kovacs was, in his time, accused of being a fascist and a racist and utterly devoid of compassion of tolerance. But in those days, accusations of that sort were flying thick and fast. In fact, if all such accusations are to be believed, then this very same esteemed publication would share more than just initials with The National Front, but would perhaps partake of its flawed ideology as well. If all such accusations are to be believed, then almost half of America were secretly raving rabid Communist zealots just waiting for the red flag to fly, and almost the entire other half were jackbooted supremacist beasts, with just a tiny micro-thin vein of true American patriots lined up down the middle, caught in between.

No matter his supposed political failings, Kovacs was by far the most honest of the heroes of his era. He never once made any apologies about what he was, not even to himself. He was also the least compromising, his ideology bifurcated into starkest white and darkest black, surpassing The Comedian's endless oceans of grey.

Despite the fairly clear delineation of Kovacs' manifesto, he remains one of the most misunderstood vigilantes of yore.

And no-one portrays this lack of understanding better than his countless imitators.

Rorschach these days is a dime a dozen. Every week some new Rorschach is dragged into a precinct lock-up and given some time to get his face on. And always they scream about some manner of politics, some agenda, some idiocy. They unmask on television and use their so-called fifteen minutes of fame to extol not Rorschach's manifesto but some ill-conceived notion of hatred and injustice.

The comics shops that used to sell merely movie-quality cutlasses and eye-patches and custom-printed Jolly Rogers now also sell t-shirts with ever-changing black blots against a white white background. Now, alongside 'Badges Not Masks' and 'Who Watches The Watchmen,' and the ever-popular Hiroshima Shadow Couple, graffiti artists spray here there and everywhere the symmetrical sigil of the long-lost crusader.

And elsewhere, one finds it brazenly proclaimed: 'Rorschach lives.'

'Rorschach lives.'

Rorschach may live but Walter Kovacs is spinning in his grave.

For all his supposed failings and idiosyncrasies, Kovacs-as-Rorschach learned and professed before the end that evil comes not solely exclusively only only only from left-wing pinko communists and their liberal supporters, that evil not comes solely exclusively only only only from religious zealots and extreme-right persecutors of colour and race and creed, but that evil too can come from patriots and dreamers and laissez-faire capitalists. Evil comes from white collar and blue collar and white skin and black skin and all the colours of the rainbow. Evil can come from either wing, and any angle, and unless we are ever vigilant, that evil can overwhelm even the most dedicated of defenders.

Evil can even come from hangers-on, from lazybones counterfeiters dressed up like good men and espousing good men's virtues, whose right to use the names of the fallen is as utterly false as the Lovecraftian facsimile teleported onto the roof of The Institute for Extraspatial Studies on The Day The Earth Stood Still.

Evil can come from anywhere. He knew that.

Do any of you know that? Do any of you realise that?

You try so hard to pigeonhole evil, to codify and quantify and ordinate it.

Evil deceives. Evil hides its face. And it hides behind an infinity of masks.

And we owe it to the uncompromising honesty of the man that saw evil's True Face to not narrow our battles down to one mask, or two, or even several. No evil too massive, no evil too inconsequential.

We owe it to Rorschach not to falsify the truth of his face.

I never will.

I will: Grasp the torch. Bear it higher.

I will: Never let it fall, never let it gutter, never smudge it out.

Rorschach lives.

Rorschach lives."

-from a letter to the editor of The New Frontiersman, author unknown.​

 

[ChasNicollette]

Confabulation: 10-14-2005. 2:13 AM.

Finally the shadow moved and turned it's head. "Did you really have to do that much damage Rorschach?" he said noticing the vigillantee that was trying to sneak up on him.

A patch of the darkness mottled with light paused in its tracks.

And then walked more plainly, stepping out into a spill of light, the white of mask and of blouse standing out from the black.

She had her gloved hands in the pockets of her buttoned coat, and the never-static shadows across her face took on a configuration not unlike impressed bemusement.

"Hnnnh."

"Security conscious."

"Good."

...though this seemed to be more addressed to herself than to her caped counterpart across the way.

She tilted her head, and she examined him, top to bottom, head to toe, and then from toe to head.

"Nightwatch," she inclined her head, and this it seemed was the actual beginning of conversation. "Acceptable risks. Collateral damage. Risked: lives of life-takers. Damaged: property of property-damagers. No innocents harmed."

She chuckled. "Knew the risks, or should have, when they embarked on life of crime. Perhaps they should have gotten insurance. Don't think this damage covered by 'Act of God.' Hehhhh."

 

[thewhiterabbit8]

She could see the company car following behind her like a slow moving nurse shark the car sped up and rolled down the window. “We have reports of a rampaging machine on Chester Boulevard” that was just wonderful the prototype M24 Hausen (Project Colossus) was stored in that area time for damage control she thought. “It appears as if the machine is coated with some type of, some type of energy shroud”

The A.I was only supposes to assist the crew but if they became disabled the Hausen had several directive one which included self preservation. Her big boy was just getting his first view of the city and now she would have to punish him. “Bernard take the car to the garage I have some work to do” it took her only moments to project a field a mile across that would convince anyone looking at her she was not who she appeared.

Project colossus an intelligent virus that grew from the digital zoo’s of the Pen laboratory into something approaching human. They could not make decisions on there own or should not have been able. Only they could react to an animal, if a wolf pup is burned it will retreat if it see food it will attack.

It was a fragile guise one like a cheap parlor trick or a magic eye if you looked to close you could easily see through it. But most people had given up the ability to think and would not think twice about it. She found a small scoot the portable two wheeled sub bike moved at only 25 mph but that was all she needed. The machine was tearing down the road like some great metal ape.

“Get out of here the thing has gone mad” most likely it was only defending itself from some perceived attack. She could see a plug jutting out the back the mobile feed dragging along in the air. The Hauser had yet to use its guns maybe it did not have bullets or maybe it was just brushing people aside as not to hurt them. What ever the case the small guns of the police could not pierce the thick skin.

The machine turned looking down on her “Momma” the machine spoke offering a hand grabbing onto a foot hold she pulled her self up. The police continued to fire the machine dug into the ground flipping over a squad car. “You have been a bad boy” she scolded the machine wondering if this would at all end well. The machine was top secret meant for areas too hostile for unshielded human life.

Hausen continued to move towards the power plant she could see news dirigibles high above if Hausen used his guns. She watched Hausen step onto a car smashing it like a toy before he continued on. The mobile feed swinging like a tail smashed through a telephone pole knocking it into the street. Emily watched as cars tried to get out of the way of the giant as it continued its march.

 

[LuckyVic]

Nightwatch

She chuckled. "Knew the risks, or should have, when they embarked on life of crime. Perhaps they should have gotten insurance. Don't think this damage covered by 'Act of God.' Hehhhh."

He showed no physical reaction. "You play by their rules long enough you become one of them." he told her. The voice modulator in his mask hiding any sign of emotion. "We know better, we also need to do better." It was a lecture he had given Rorschach before... many times.

He had sworn to help those that couldn't help themselves. To protect the weak and the innocent. But that had to be done correctly. Just because they could do it, wasn't enough. They had to do this because it was the right thing to do. And they should do it with a higher set of values then those before them. One of which was not to set themselves up as judge, jury, and executioners.

 

[ChasNicollette]

He showed no physical reaction. "You play by their rules long enough you become one of them." he told her. The voice modulator in his mask hiding any sign of emotion. "We know better, we also need to do better." It was a lecture he had given Rorschach before... many times.

"'Rules,'" Rorschach shook her head. "Tch. Lack thereof. Would be funny: ancient codex of criminal etiquette going back to time of Hammurabi."

She turned away from Nightwatch, requiring no technological assistance to drown her feelings out of her voice. She gazed out into the gulf that had held him rapt only moments previously.

"Been reading too many pirate comics," she chided. "They have no rules. I have plenty. Just different than yours. Harder."

She gestured to Nightwatch with a gloved hand, her face taking on a configuration that suggested arched eyebrows.

"Your rules? Inadequate. Devoid of consequence."

"Hnnfh."

"Soft."

 

[Lunaramblings]

October 11th, 2005.

The snow swirls around the convoy. The men in the dirigibles push forward, through snow falling in sheets.

Like Hannibal of old, a threat comes of the Himalayas. A band of conquerors. This world is slowly fading. Turning sickly and weak. It is time for a great culling.

Twenty years ago I tried to save the world. I succeeded. For a time. But these... these fools. They don't understand the truths I have shown them. This world is flawed. Twisted and wrong. But I will embrace my destiny. I will bring this world to the light.

A man stands and moves across the deck. As he reaches the end of the cabin he looks out the window.

For twenty years, I have been the pariah. The exile. I have been forced into the shadows. No more. This is my world. People will see and understand that soon enough. Egyptian mythology tells us that the pharaohs will be reborn into a new world. I stand on the precipice of this world. Ozymandias will be reborn. Ozymandias will return to rule the weak and huddled masses. I am Ozymandias.



Nearly twenty years ago.

There is a place of myth. A place where the spirit meets the real. This place sits high in an unapproachable pass in the Himalayas, a place that only the chosen can find. The is Shangri-la. Or so it is called by some. The residents, the humble spiritualists here call it Nanda Parbat. This is the land of the redeemed. A place where for centuries people have come seeking redemption. It is to this lonely place that Ozymandias disappeared.

Ozymandias become like a God. Remaking the people in his own image. Through a refined Veidt method, Ozymandias began his plan. In the least twenty years he has bred an army. An army unlike the likes this world has ever known. Combining the spiritual warrior philosophies of the people of Nanda Parbat, with the refining characteristics that Ozymandias used to start his own transformation, he has created humans capable of things more than human.



Modern Day. October 12th, 2005.

A series of dirigibles land at the docking station.

"Doug, we got three more dirigibles waiting, we are on the last one from Great House Shipping, but the two from Khem Industrial are fully loaded. See if you can get the guys that are on break to come back early." A husky older man calls to the young guy driving the fork lift.

"Ok, I put it over the walkies. Crazy busy the last few weeks. Think we gonna get a bonus?"

"Kid, in 19 year's time, I ain't never so much as heard whisper of a bonus. You think cause we are triplin' las' years numbeh's they gonna give us one now?"

"Hey, I can dream right?"





October 11th, 2005

"My people. Phase one is nearly complete. In less then twenty four hours, we shall be in our land of milk and honey. And we shall begin our pilgrimage. This, my children, is our calm before the storm. There are those that would call us fools. How can so few, stand against so many. How can a contingent such as ours, possibly stand and face the corrupt and vile world?" Ozymandias pauses. Looking over the masses. 5000 men. Armed only with their body, their wit, and his example. "We, we are the righteous my children. We shall stand like so many have done through history. Like brave Leonidas at the Hot Gates, we shall face the damnable hordes. We shall wage war on our terms. And while their arrows may blot out the sun, WE my children, Shall fight in the shade! This is our moment. Our final stand. We will save this world. Or we shall bring it to Hell with us."

Ozymandias revels in the cheers. This is the end. For better or worse. Ozymandias strides into the darkness awaiting him. The sounds of 5000 men securing for landing fill the bay of the ship.

 

[thewhiterabbit8]

Hausen arrived at one of the many stacked roads that like the human circulatory system fed the city. “We have to go back Hausen” she demanded but the machine would not be deterred from his mission. A tow cable shot over the other side as the machine pulled itself up the side of the concrete pillar. Clinging onto the massive scoop like shovel she watched as he pulled himself up and over the edge. Cars swerved out of the way but a few slammed into Hausen and each other forming a massive pile.

She slammed into the machine a long trail of blood flowed over her eye and cheek as she faded into a memory. It was back on the Dirigible her family was taking a trip from New York to London to Egypt to Sydney. They should never have gone anywhere near china but a storm had cut fuel supplies dangerously low. Then the ship was struck the engine coughed flames everywhere.

When she woke up she was in her cabin the room was filling with water the door was shut tight and no one could hear them. He brother was already dead she grabbed his body covering him in a blanket. Another dirigible was already overheard lowering a rescue basket that she placed him in climbing on top. She watched the men as they tried to touch her brother but she simple growled at them.

She woke up in a pool of her own blood a few mm at most the machine was quickly advancing again on the power plant. The hum of its engines told her it had recently recharged but how that was not a function of Hausen. The police were keeping there distance on the eight lane highway enough so that he could not just reach out and crush them. “To anyone inside that machine surrender you’re hostage”.

The machine slammed into a hastily built wall launching her into an air mat cables were thrown over Hauser. “Mr. Hall we are glad to see you are not hurt” It was her pig in shinning armor she watched the army pull hauser onto a flatbed truck. The cables were acting as some kind of tap draining energy from him. “You came just in the nick of time” the soldier tossed in a grenade killing the unconscious men.

“I just need some air” she asked walking towards her man servant who had been following them in a stolen army car. He wrapped his coat around her and served her some water as they drove away it was one hell of a night. Hauser might be wiped or worse scrapped the military did not like broken machine. More likely the crew would be charged and the entire even would be pushed under the carpet.

 

[ChasNicollette]

Congregation: 10-13-2005. 8:04 PM.

Hollis Mason's old neighbourhood was still a rough one.

But it was not abandoned.

Hollis Mason's old building, his auto shop, the loft thereabove, these were still run down. Some claimed they were haunted, a little.

But this was not abandoned, either.

Qualia Jones rolled her wheelchair out from the repair bay, her glasses gleaming in the dulling light of day. Pulling back on her right wheel, she twisted and turned to face the way she'd come and, glancing up at the open bay door, then takked a key on the controls by her right hand.

The steel shuddered, and winched its way down like a portcullis of old, cinching shut. She gazed at it quietly, and takked another key on her controls.

The pale green neon sign she'd put up over Mason's old name winked out, ceasing its blinking: "Silverwheel's Repairs."

The boys had already gone home. Early closing on Thursday nights.

Small-engined lawnmowers, sewing machines, microwaves, computers, mp8 units, Oldsmobiles and smoke detectors and the occasional Saint Solutions doodad... even old wristwatches. Silverwheel's pretty much fixed anything that broke, got it running and kept it running. Didn't matter how new, didn't matter how obsolete, Qualia pieced it together in less time and less money than the bigger chain fix-it shops.

People claimed that without Qualia's altruism, fixing washing machines and furnaces for cheap when scowling slumlords refused to foot the bill, the neighbourhood would have fallen apart long ago. Qualia wasn't positive that this was an accurate statement. She just did her best.

She did her best for all her clients.

Even the ones for whom she had to close early on Thursday nights.

Qualia rolled her way over to the staircase that climbed the side of the building, wheeling her gleaming chair into place against the chairlift she'd installed. The arms clamped 'round, hissed into place, guided her sideways and upward...

Qualia hummed a little song to herself as she rose. Billie Holiday.

With a whizz and a clonk the lift brought her to the landing at the top, and released her to roll forward and unlock the upstairs door...

It was dark inside. And under most circumstances, in this neck of the woods, one would be unwise indeed to enter a dark room without first flicking on a switch and surveilling the surroundings. But Qualia knew the creature waiting for her in this darkness meant her no harm. Her lips shifted into a soft smirk as she closed the door behind her, her eyes twinkling behind the amber-tinted lenses of her spectacles.

"Rorschach?" she wondered.

A little click sounded from the kitchen area, and a little light went on. Refrigerator interior light.

"Through here," the voice intoned. Unmistakable.

Qualia smiled faintly, and propelled herself through the apartment, navigating obstacles in the semi-darkness with a ruefully eidetic memory, pausing only to pick up a briefcase that she'd earlier lain upon the cushions of the setee and to lay this across her lap.

She trundled to a stop in the kitchen.

The woman stood there, dressed in black. Wig and hat and mask-that-was-face. Suit and tie. Spotless. She bathed in the cool incandescence of the fridge's dome light, and she drank orange juice straight from the carton.

Qualia arched an eyebrow. "Skip breakfast?"

Rorschach grunted, popping the carton shut again and sliding this back into its pre-ordained space in the fridge door. She took a black handkerchief out of her pocket. and dabbed at her lips before rolling the fabric of her face back down to hide her lower countenance.

"Skipped breakfast," she acknowledged. "Yesterday. Thirsty, now."

"But not hungry?" Qualia mused, nodding slowly. "Your, uh, 'thesis,' that must be paying off."

"Mm," Rorschach grunted, turning away from the fridge but not yet closing the door, not yet plunging them into darkness. "Marked improvement in reaction time, perceptual sharpness, nightvision. Negligible enhancement of musculoskeletal durability. Endurance significantly increased, body far more energy-efficient. Better. Not good enough. Accelerated regeneration likely fairy-tale balderdash. (Shame.)"

Qualia sighed mock-dismally, wryly. "Caveat lector."

Rorschach chortled, a bizarre chuffing sound. "Amen. Selah. Still. Much prefer Method to your coffee table books. 'Weeping Gorilla Comix?'"

"What can I say?" Qualia grinned, unrepentant. "I'm a sucker for Chucklin' Duck's smug sense of accomplishment."

"Hmp."

Qualia's thumbs popped open the catches on the briefcase, and she opened the case in her lap, across the arms of her wheelchair. To business.

The bespectacled redhead extricated two small tubes, wrapped in leather. Rorschach accepted these with brisk movements.

"Fresh Cee-Oh-Two for your grappling gun," she instructed. "And more sleeping agent for the new toy. (Just don't mix them up when you're reloading in a hurry.)"

Rorschach snorted, dubious. "Tch. Please."

Qualia chuckled, holding up a placating hand. "Humour me. Let an old girl worry about her best customer."

"Hnnfh."

Changing the subject effortlessly, Qualia turned her attention to Rorschach's raiment. "How are the aramid plates holding up, the inserts in the fabric of the new suit? Have I placed the joints properly? ...wouldn't want to hamper your movement when you're scrabbling up fire-escapes or leaping from rooftops."

"Exemplary," Rorschach nodded. "Zero reduction in flexibility. Enjoy elbow plates. Nice surprise for pimp near Times Square when he got elbow to jaw, Tuesday. Looking forward to trying out knee plates on various criminal scrota at next given opportunity. Almost as much fun as titanium-toed shoes."

"I was more concerned with defensive applications," Jones chuckled faintly. "You're not bulletproof, you know. Your vitals are protected, but those plates aren't all-encompassing, and they're not impenetrable."

Rorschach hnnnfed dismissively. "Will be fine. Besides, have spider-silk under-armour on order from Japan. Should arrive in days. Will be fine."

Qualia nodded, though she was not entirely convinced. "All right then. You've thought about it, at any rate."

"Yes," Rorschach confirmed.

Qualia returned her attention to the briefcase, licking her lips. "Right. What else have we got? Hm."

She held up a pair of black gloves, submitted them for Rorschach's approval.

"Already have gloves," she seemed to frown. "Like them fine."

Qualia grinned. "You'll like these better. Micro-EM emitters in the fingertips, came up with them while I was scrubbing someone's hard drive the other day. I don't recommend repeated uses, you know how sustained EM fields can affect the body, but in a pinch they'll be great for scrambling up metal surfaces, no matter how sheer. Great for those fire escapes."

Rorschach seemed to blink. "Also potential for hanging on during high-speed chases."

"See, you're always thinking," Qualia teased cheerfully, slipping the gloves into a little pouch. "I like that about you."

Rorschach nodded, accepting the pouch from Jones. "Always vigilant. Never inattentive."

"The charge on those won't last long," Qualia pointed out, "still working out the kinks, and my lithium supplier is out of stock again. But I've included an adaptor kit that should work on AC sockets, car-cigarette lighters, and public spark hydrants."

Rorschach took this in even as she pocketed the pouch, and clipped the pair of gas cannisters to her belt. "Understood. Will change gloves later. Before work."

Qualia nodded. "Thought you might."

She removed an envelope from her pocket, presented this to Qualia. "Usual fee. Plus extra. Had good week."

Qualia arched a crimson brow, receiving the envelope and placing it into the briefcase before snapping the thing closed. "Pimp near Times Square was loaded?"

"Also. Wednesday: dropped heroin dealer face-first off tower of Belvedere Castle. Was surprisingly generous in his Last Will and Testament. Good chunk of total to November Fund. Rest to you."

"And the week's not even over yet," Qualia smiled, and prayed that the yellow lenses of her spectacles kept her concern at bay.

"Mm," Rorschach nodded. "Got line on coke peddlers selling to high schoolers. Work, work, work. ('Line.' 'Coke.' Hehhh.)"

"Best get to it, then," Jones smiled that smile again, and this time she knew her eyes were just shining with worry.

Rorschach gazed at her quietly, and closed the fridge.

The light winked out, and the only illumination in the apartment was the flickering streetlamp out front, and the eerie pseudo-phosphorescent ink of Qualia's tattoos.

"Post tenebras lux," Rorschach murmured.

"Amen," Qualia agreed. "Selah."

There was a moment of silence in the darkness, and Qualia was sure she was alone, but then: "Arianrhod. Thank you."

Qualia smiled quietly in the darkness, more than a little touched. Subtle, sincerely polite gestures were rare in the presence of this one: "You wanna thank me, you'll give Nightwatch my phone number, next you see him. I bet he's gorgeous."

"Hehhh," was the only response.

And then Qualia really was sitting by herself in the dark.

She steepled her hands atop the briefcase, and she gazed contemplatively into the space where Rorschach had been standing, the space before the fridge.

Qualia knew Alisa. But it was an unspoken rule between them that Qualia never ever acknowledge the hollow little enigma that was A's "real life."

At 33, Qualia was ten years A's senior. Qualia had babysat for A, when she had been an infant. ...there was an ironic Bob Dylan reference in there, somewhere, but suddenly Qualia felt too tired to make it.

Jones was the only person Alisa had left. The only person A had.

Qualia knew Alisa from before. And Alisa knew Qualia from before.

From before the night when Qualia had been literally stabbed in the back. From before the night when Alisa, A, from before she had...

From before she had shattered. And picked up her own pieces, and put them back together as... this.

They had been fast friends, once, despite their age difference.

Nowadays, A didn't have any friends. Qualia was as close as one got.

They were no longer friends; Qualia was still A's babysitter, in a sense.

They were a team.

Q. ...and A.

 

[thewhiterabbit8]

It was a church she had known as a child one that had been built after the old church was burned down. Some said arson others said it was an act of god to a people that had lost there faith in any power higher then money.

What ever the case may have been the lot had been bought by a televangelist who had built a great stadium like church and school. The church had no actually attendees just a digital audience that applauded always on cue. Not even a major scandal could rock the church from its steady foundation.

The small nine millimeter looked gigantic in the thirteen year old boys hands as he walked down the isle of the church “One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish” he spoke was he blew out the kneecaps of the priest. She watched him from the back row in her true form a woman in a long sundress. The priest was begging the boy or god it did not matter no one listed to him as the boy placed the gun to his head. “And the lord said let there be light” a bright spotlight flooded the room was windows smashed.

The boy turned to her blood and brain matter running down his face the body of a nun at his feet he smiled. The boy looked so familiar had she seen him in a magazine or a picture what ever it was the eyes captured her. They were so big like some kind of cartoon the swallowed ever inch of light around them. She tried to look away but she was ensnared by his eyes like some kind of frightened creature in a trap.

“Angel you were right hell never hurt us, hell never hurt us again” the swat team rushed past her in all there gear as the boy raised the gun. Clear, what was that she was leaving her body? A bright light flooded her world the boy mouthing a thank you as the world was flooded with bright lights. “Mr…..Hall” she was seconds latter bathed in blood a body resting on her chest. “You could have waited till he was sure I was alive” she struck his arm hard enough to move him back her shirt was undone. She must have passed out on the way to the hospital because she could not recall driving or walking here.

She had to rescue Hauser before he became a toaster or something. But she needed help a hero for hire if one existed if not she would have to convince someone to help her. It was easy enough to find someone just ask the roaches. While being simple creatures they were every where. “I want you to find some one with a strong Aura”. She asked the roach sending it of to spread the word.

Meanwhile Bernard began to treat her head wound vodka and a sewing kit the flesh peeling back to reveal a nasty gash. “Give me that” she demanded taking the bottle she drank half a dozen shots which filled the car with stars.

The car stuck something it was small almost no bigger then a cat Bernard threw on the brakes but hit a telephone pole. “Buckle up” she spouted holding t he bottle looking for what they hit the animal was half dead. A dog without tags it looked pitiful there bleeding all over the road she dipped her fingers in the blood. “Look at you I bet you think you’re life is bad” she smeared it over her lips like lipstick.

Bernard was gone no doubt finding someone to blame he would never let her go to jail no matter what. Slowly she covered her chest using some cord to replace the buttons as she staggered down the road. She took another swig hopping the drink would erase the memory of the dream that she could forget. The boy was her brother the one she replaced but could never forget.

“On a dead mans chest yo ho ho and a bottle of rum” she spouted swerving from one side of the road to the other. She felt like she was invincible her she was a mass murderer and not one person knew who she was.

 

[LuckyVic]

10-14-2005. 2:13 Am

"Your rules? Inadequate. Devoid of consequence."

"Hnnfh."

"Soft."

"You still don't see the big picture do you?!"

"It's my rules that keep you doing your thing. Because deep down I know your trying to help. If for an instant I thought you were a danger to those I'm trying to protect I would stop you." He said just as a flash of lightning soon follwed by a crash of thunder.

"Something is coming ahead Rorschach, I can feel it in my gut. And we're not even close to being ready for it. Your free because I can't stop what's coming by myself." The cold voice of technology stated. "Humanity is about to be judged, and may be found wanting."

 

[ChasNicollette]

"You still don't see the big picture do you?!"

"Size of picture irrelevant," she opined. "See Truth."

Clouds had gathered across the blooming moon of earlier.

Barometric pressure had shifted.

"It's my rules that keep you doing your thing. Because deep down I know your trying to help. If for an instant I thought you were a danger to those I'm trying to protect I would stop you." He said just as a flash of lightning soon follwed by a crash of thunder.

Lightning cut the sky, and Rorschach counted in her head: one-one-thou--

Kooooooom.

She held out her fingers to check for rain, adjusting her hat with the other hand.

"Stop me," she pondered. "You would try. Might not be so easy as you think."

"Something is coming ahead Rorschach, I can feel it in my gut. And we're not even close to being ready for it. Your free because I can't stop what's coming by myself." The cold voice of technology stated. "Humanity is about to be judged, and may be found wanting."

She cupped her chin in her palm, absent-mindedly scratching at her elbow as she did do.

"'The end is still nigh.'"

"Hm."

"You feel it, too? (Aegri somnia.)"

One raindrop. Two. The storm was coming.

'The ants go marching ten by ten, hurrah, hurrah
The ants go marching ten by ten, hurrah, hurrah
The ants go marching ten by ten,
The little one stops to say "THE END"
And they all go marching down to the ground
To get out of the rain, BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!'

She put her hands into the pockets of her coat.

"Happy Hastings Day, Nightwatch," Rorschach intoned. "Planet about due for a Domesday. Last one didn't take."

She shook her head as the rain started to fall. "Cooperation not my strong suit. (Not looking to socialise.) But. Will do my best to. Help."

She unbuttoned her coat, removed the grappling gun, buttoned back up again one-handed as rain spattered off of the gleaming hook, of the body of the device itself.

"Can't promise help will be of your preferred variety."

"Can promise won't let humanity go quietly."

"...even if species is wanting. Badly wanting. Natural selection no excuse for surrender."

"Extinction synonym for surrender."

Rorschach walked to the railing, bounded up, hauled herself one handed to crouch atop that railing, balancing even in the rain, turning back to face Nightwatch, never flinching, almost oblivious to the gaping precipice behind her.

She fired the grappling hook, and it wrapped 'round the railing, hooking on.

"May not be goody-two-shoes. May not be kind."

"But this is my species, too."

"Not going quietly."

"Never."

She kicked away from the railing, fell backwards into space, the cable of the grappler unwinding and unwinding and unwinding...

...she abseiled into the abyss.

Fearless.

 

[ChasNicollette]

14 October 2005. The wee small hours.

Skitterskitterskitter.

The road had been hard. The road had been long.

...sewer tunnels and sidewalks and stomping feet.

...following its antennae, and a base instinct superimposed on its insectoid consciousness.

Detecting auras wasn't a problem for insects. Hive minds, collective insect consciousnesses, had been jolted just as much as some human brains by the psychokinetic detonation that had accompanied the teleported clone-beast.

What psychic energies resided in Emily had infected the roach, and it flew as fast as its segmented sextet of limbs could carry it.

Skitterskitterskitter...

...skitterskitterskitter.

Tracking auras over a distance, however. This was another matter.

And Emily had not been very specific, nor was the cockroach capable of discerning specificity. The command had had to be simple.

The sun had risen in the sky.

But the green neon sign about Silverwheel's Repairs was not yet alight.

The roach stopped. Verified its direction, and then proceeded to climb the stairs to the right of the building.

It squeezed under the door, exoskeletal contortionist. It paused again, antennae quivering.

And then sprinted, zigging and zagging under coffee tables and setees and zipping through the spokes of an empty wheelchair, running up the leg of a bed.

Again, it stopped.

Human woman.

She was naked, and beautiful, though the cockroach lacked the sensory and cognitive apparatus to appreciate this.

She lay on her back atop the tangled white sheets, her red hair spilling on the pillows of her bed. Her skin was lined with softly glowing verdant glyphics, an artistic representation of techno-organic circuitry...

Up and down her legs, surface electrodes covered her skin at important muscle points, climbing no higher than her upper thighs. Machines beside her bed ticked away, producing electromyographic images to be reviewed upon her waking and using adaptive neurofeedback to try and keep her once-strong leg muscles from deteriorating with disuse.

Qualia Jones was trying to figure out what made her leg muscles tick. So that she could get them kicking again...

The directive was clear. This was a strong aura. The very strongest.

This was the goal. The cockroach need only now get her attention.

It skittered. Sat on her toe.

Nothing happened. Not a twitch. This approximated confusion in the roach, because normally at this point the human would be trying to scrabble away, screaming and brandishing...

It skittered further up her leg. Still nothing.

The cockroach's antennae twitched again, and it skittered still further, depositing itself upon her flat stomach.

Now she twitched, and some tiny analog of victorious success trilled through the insect's tiny brain.

She blinked. She sat up, her hair tumbling 'round her shoulders and over her breasts. Her face scrunched up as her eyes struggled to focus... she reached over to her bedside table and snagged her glasses, sliding them on her face.

Her eyes went wide. Her face went crimson.

"Goddammit! FUCK! Shitshitshit!"

Her hand blurred, slapping the cockroach away, sending it spinning through the air into the wall where it thudded lightly, tumbled to the floor...

She lunged for her bedside table, yanked open the drawer.

Out came a particularly large carving knife.

(This was not a good neighbourhood, and Qualia Jones was a practical woman. Sleeping without a weapon handy just didn't make good sense.)

Her hand went back, her hand flew forward, and the knife spun end over end over end...

...the knife lodged quivering in the floorboards, severing the roach's head very neatly from its body.

The brain skidded one way. The body skidded another.

The brain quietly died from lack of oxygen, and the body skittered lazily away, destined to starve to death a few days later.

(Roaches were hard to kill. New York City roaches, doubly so.)

Qualia sat up, seething, red all over save for the etchings of green, and she shuddered. Shuddered hard.

"Eyuck. Little bastard. How'd you avoid my roach motels?"

Methodically, trying to calm herself, she began removing the electrodes from her legs.

"That's one Blattaria that's not going to outlive my species..."

But as the roach's brain died, its infected energies returned through the ether to Emily. And with those energies went a location...

Silverwheel's.

For a woman with Emily's resources, even in her troubled state, a phone number should be a simple thing to find.

 

[thewhiterabbit8]

Emily Hall was much like a tree. All the living parts of the world no matter how distant or small became part of her body if she so chose. Yet finding a strong aura proved far more daunting then imagined.

Dividing her attention between a hundred, hundred bodies was no mean feat even for someone of her metal abilities. Yet she had to spread her self even thinner each time another roach was infected.

It was almost impossible to separate each individual soldier one form the other bugs. Very hard even if the thoughts were simple they came in blindingly fast.

Then there was the maze of the city constantly she had to draw there attention back onto the task at hand of finding a strong aura. Competing with food, sex, and other males should have forced her to choose female yet the males were far easier to control.

This did not even consider the minute attention she spared her own living shell lying on the street. Almost all her life energies were moving farther and farther away from her faster and faster. She became dimly aware of the rising sun slowly exposing the degenerate and corrupt skeleton of the city.

As her armor was peeled away her mind began to wander back to the first time she had taken on the mantle of her brother. She recalled the tight restriction of her cloths as she had fought those lowly and base instincts of a young girl.

Yet she had a job to do slowly but surely it formed a map in he mind not of streets and pipes but life a web of vibrant and weak auras interconnected.

Some auras faded and vanished like a weak breeze while others grew from small flames into great infernos.

It was hard some roaches grouped together, taking small pictures of the cities aura while others where widely separated. It all came back in bits and pieces sliding into slots as she built the map more lime a piece of music then a picture. The most interesting were the slums of the city were bright auras flashed out of existence while others smoldered.

Back at her body she had to fight of a few stray dogs that smelt something like death, animals showed such strong insight into Aura. She threw up a wall barring all but the leader. Who was a brawny young male who knew no fear of man or woman? As the dog bit down on her hand she sent pain through his body. The memory of heat, a heat stronger then the sun stronger then fire now all but a weak distant well aged memory.

Slowly she willed her body upward prepared to wipe out every last mongrel in the city when it hit her. It entered her foot and gathered in her brain a note stronger then any she had experienced till that moment. The image formed slowly not like a television picture but a painting with hews light and dark.

It was alien, bizarre like something out of a dream electronic lights merging with human aura entwining. The flesh was not so bad either, it was soft, supple and firm stretched perfectly over bone and muscle.

The legs were electric like a fence it hurt to reach out and collect the aura pain, no damage to the legs. The creature was confused as it moved over the body it is hard to read a single thought unless it came over, and over. The death was far simpler the creature was then was not alive. Its head after leaving its body was still sending back images of its own swan song.

Grabbing hold of her legs she found that for a moment she could not move them slowly she took out a sat phone. She dialed a number and tried again to stand the idea of her body betraying her was disturbing. Feedback from the strong Aura it should not last too long. But why was it only in her legs and not another part.

“If you have this number you know the beef, so don’t wasted anymore of my time or you’re money and spill the beans” that was rather rude of course she had never been herself the most charming person when leaving a message. After the beep “I need to liberate some sensitive technology, money is, well honestly of no concern to me time on the other hand is something in very short supply” she waited for an answer.

 

[Abraxas Winterlight]

Adam Thorne: Fenris 10/14/2005 0154 hrs

I come to central park to get some relief from the seething putrid mass of humanity that is New York. Three million plus people and their filth and noise and smell.

Heh. And to think five years ago I was a city boy. Preferred a skyline of lights and concrete over stars and trees.

I looked up at the nighttime sky. It was cold, overcast & windy.

Storm coming. Hunting tonight was going to be lousy.
In the city both hunter and prey were soft. Weak. Neither would be out in a downpour.

Besides, in the month that I had been here the criminals were starting to wise up that the park was not a safe place to conduct business. Police were much more active too. You could tell them apart because cops smell like gun oil. Steel and cordite. Crook usually stank of sweat, fear and this crazy smell that they get in this city.

Seems Kovacs wasn't as gone as people think. Either he was back after twenty years, or someone was doing one hell of a imitation. Either way crooks were walking scared. Living on edge, never knowing if this was going to be their last heist, last trick (though Rorschach was never documented killing a prostitute), or last deal.

Animal control was more active in the park too. Seems this big black dog had been seen in the park lately. I chuckled, causing a young latino to look at me from narrowed eyes, then hurry off, pushing his bankroll further down his crotch.

My voice is not nice. It reminds people why we slept in caves and invented fire to keep back the nightmares. It hinted at the beast I kept within me.

Thunder rumbled, closer now. what few people in the park were hurrying on their way. Pretty soon the only ones left would be cops and the homeless. Neither were my prey, though the cops may be amusing for a while.

Scratch that! Thinking like that can get you in trouble. Feed the beast, but feed it on your terms. let it out, and it gets harder and harder to reign in.

Remember Hope. Remember what the beast can do.

I made my way out of the park to the boom of thunder and flash of lightning.

Storm was coming.

I made my way into the concrete forest. Smells changed from living plants and soil to oil, rot and decay, with the ever pervasive smell of fear. In this part of town, there was much more prey than predator.

A soft laugh behind me and the 'snick' of a switchblade opening let me know that not all the predators feared the storm. It seems someone thought me prey. A gust of rain-scented wind blew by, and I checked that thought. Three someones though I was a meal. One had a gun. Fired recently. The smell of old blood was on one. And one smelled of insanity.

I stopped and turned. I saw three youths walking up to me. One had a knife held low to his side, one with his hand in his old army jacket, hand gripping something small and hard. The gun most likely.

The third was older. Stank of sweat and blood. Some his, most not. Crazy eyes and he stank of drugs and madness. I couldn't see a weapon, but he had one. This was the alpha.

"Something i can do for you boys?" I let out, voice so low it was almost a growl.

"Yeah Puta, you can hand over your wallet and watch, and if you suck cock good enough you may get to keep yours. Hand the shit over you stupid gringo!" said the crazy eyed one.

I stopped, hand loose at my side and the beast rising inside me. Sounds were sharper, I could see everything, the three bangers outlined in this weird silvery/grey aura that I see when my eyes start to shift. My temperature started rising, and my pulse raced.

"I don't think so culero. Why don't you go home and play with your toys there before you get hurt."

Crazy eyes stopped breathing for a second. Guess nobody had ever called him a asshole before.

"Fuck this bitch up!" he yelled, and then they were on me.

Switchblade came at me first. I grabbed his wrist and twisted, hearing first a pop, then a scream as his wrist broke and the knife fell to the ground. I let go and grabbed a handfull of his shirt, and threw him into handgun as the .22 was being pulled from his pocket. Both of them flew back into a mound of garbage, burying them in waste.

They should feel right at home. Hope the rats are hungry.

Crazy eyes stood there, mouth hanging open. About two seconds had gone by and his friends were laying in a heap and not moving, and he was here all alone.

Guess he was gonna go home without that oral pleasure he ordered.

About a second later he pulled a damned machete out from under his coat and came at me with a roar. Drugs and insanity made him unpredictable, and he caught a piece of my arm before I got my hand on his wrist.

Fuck! This was a good jacket! I clamped my hand down and heard and felt bones crack as he screamed and fell to his knees.

The beast wanted me to throat the bastard, but the human makes the decisions.

I walked away a minute later leaving him in a pool of his own puke and piss, both arms broken, wrist crushed and leg snapped.

His wallet held five different drivers licenses, two of them women, one maybe eighteen.

All had blood on them and stank of old fear. If I hadn't found that I might have let him go with the warning.

I took the money from his wallet (about $50.00) and his cell, then dialed 911.

"Come pick up some trash on Edison and Third." I said, my voice rougher than normal with the beast this close to the surface. "One more thing, Rorschach lives."

I popped the battery out of the phone and threw the phone up on the roof of the building above me, and the battery across the road.

Then I made my way back to the hotel i was staying at. First some food. Playtime always makes me hungry.

 

[ChasNicollette]

14/Oct/5, continued.

“If you have this number you know the beef, so don’t wasted anymore of my time or you’re money and spill the beans” that was rather rude of course she had never been herself the most charming person when leaving a message. After the beep “I need to liberate some sensitive technology, money is, well honestly of no concern to me time on the other hand is something in very short supply” she waited for an answer.

Qualia had just removed the last of the electrodes and caught up the baby-blue button-down shirt that hung from one of the handles of her wheelchair when her cordless rang.

The phone had three numbers attached to it.

One was the number for the repair shop downstairs, which redirected to the apartment if no-one picked up down there. The second was her personal line.

The third number was what she called "Line '77."

Each number had a different ringtone. And the ringtone now was the ringtone for the third number.

Wagner's Ride of The Valkyries.

The number A called if she needed anything fixed as that madwoman masked avenger. And there were others who called that number, though they were few and far between, others who called that number who sought to circumnavigate the long arm of the law for reasons which weren't necessarily evil. Others who paid, and paid hard for discretion and expertise above and beyond the needs of mere mortals.

They weren't calling Silverwheel's. They weren't calling Qualia Jones. They were calling Arianrhod.

Qualia threw the shirt around her shoulders, slid her arms in the sleeves, did not yet button the shirt. With practised effortlessness she hauled herself across into the chair. ...the leather and steel felt cold against her backside.

The phone quit ringing before she could get to it. But the answering machine picked up, and Qualia snapped on the brakes of the wheelchair and listened quietly to her own voice playing back as she pulled her hair out from within the back of the shirt, started to button...

'If you have this number you know the beef, so don’t waste any more of my time or your money and spill the beans,' Jones' prerecorded spiel unfurled, and Qualia smiled a tiny little smile.

She'd let one of the boys come up with that message for her. Bitchier than her usual demeanour, but it was quick, to the point, and intentionally impenetrably cryptic.

Beep.

And then came the beans, spilling down around and all over.

'I need to liberate some sensitive technology, money is, well honestly of no concern to me time on the other hand is something in very short supply.'

Qualia ran her tongue over her teeth.

Considered bringing in the boys.

Considered contacting A.

Discarded both notions and grabbed up the phone, cradled it between her shoulder and her head as she buttoned up her shirt...

"Breakdowns: give me specifics. Locations, specs on the tech. If time is short, then be concise. I reserve the right to modify my original estimate on the fly, no refunds."

She smiled faintly, her heartbeat kicking up a notch. "This is Arianrhod. Tell me what you need."

 

[thewhiterabbit8]

tick tick, she tapped her finger on her perfect front teeth as the time slipped by. each second died a slow death as her llong fingernails impacted her teeth, tick tick.

It took her some time for her to get her legs back under her she waited after the message for what seemed like for ever. Each second ticked by she was sure that the entire world was going to crash down on her. But that’s how she lived every day of her life being drunk only made that worse.

Her mind was like Swiss cheese she had to think back to recall even her own brief exchange before listening to the woman. "Breakdowns: give me specifics. Locations, specs on the tech. If time is short, then be concise. I reserve the right to modify my original estimate on the fly, no refunds." Her body ached as she put the pieces of her mind back together the message playing again and again to make it into a useable piece of information.

a woman's voice it was not the strong tones she had expected yet they carrier power authority. a grin spread over her lips at least she would have her attention on the task at hand.

She had no time to speak before the crooning woman announced herself. "This is Arianrhod. Tell me what you need." She would not be outclassed by some faceless voice belonging to a no one a non entity in her mind. She was in charge it was already decided that this person would serve all her needs.

“An operator after my own heart, I want to acquire a soldier name Hausen you might have seen him on the news” she laughed to herself it was impossible anyone could have missed it, you would sooner miss the end days or a maces day float.

“If you don’t know him he’s 200 thousand pounds thirty feet tall with olive green skin”. Well that was enough for humor it was time for some more details no need to make her job any harder then it needed to be. “He should be located in the city, don’t worry I have his wireless address but getting a hold of him may be a bother”.

It was hard not to say more but she needed to gage her reaction. “By the way this is Emily hall sister of well if you don’t know me its no skin of my nose” she was tempting her she wanted her to know. Not because it was need but because she was tired of acting like the frail flower in her brothers garden.

 

[ChasNicollette]

Conception: 11-1-1985. 9:03 PM.

"Yarrrrrr!" she bellowed as she sprinted through the kitchen, wielding her cutlass, the aluminum-foil wrapped cardboard shimmering in the light of the overhead fixtures. She stopped in the middle of the black-tiled floor, whirled to face back the way she'd come.

"All hands on deck!" she demanded, brooking no hesitation.

She was dressed as a pirate. Her shirt was red with white stripes, she wore black bloomers and a black vest and a black hat with a skull and crossbones on it. Her knee-high socks were mismatched, one red and one white. Thick dark curls spilled down her back.

She wore an eyepatch, meant to be covering her left eye, but this had been hurriedly folded back by her mother when a couple of tripping accidents revealed her resultant lack of depth perception.

In one hand she held that makeshift weapon. In the other hand she clutched a plush toy orange cat, dressed in a costume identical to hers.

Her name was Alisa Rosenbaum, and she was three years old.

Her mother's name was Anna, and her eyes were wide and her face was pale.

"Dearest, Alisa," she pleaded, one hand on her forehead as her good high heels clacked across the tile, "do please try to calm down. It's so far past your bedtime--"

"I'm not Alisa," scowled the little girl, precocious and obstinate, "I'm Captain Lottie Sage of the dread pirate ship Robert's Revenge!"

She brandished the toy cat in her mother's direction: "First Mate Jack! This landlubber is insubordinatin'. Make her walk the plank!"

Anna Rosenbaum's eyes went even wider, and then she scowled. "No-one's making anyone walk the plank; in fact, I'm confining you to the crow's nest."

Alisa stuck her tongue out at her mother and then sprinted off again, First Mate Jack bouncing against her side as she made her escape. "Land ho! Ship ahoy! All ashore who's going ashore! Robert Louis Stevenson!"

Exasperated, Anna doggedly pursued.

Doctor Zachary Rosenbaum watched from the doorway to the kitchen, hands in the pockets of his black pinstriped suit, glasses astride his nose.

Beside him stood a thirteen-year-old redhead wearing golden glasses of her own, arms crossed over her stomach as she leaned against the archway.

Both of them looked weary. And dubious.

"Look," he mumbled. "I'm terribly sorry about all this. My boss wants to combine his post-Hallowe'en bash with brainstorming about the long-term effects of a post-Manhattan society in the face of an emboldened Red Menace. (You know. Long-term, if, erm, we don't... if we're not...) We were going to blow the whole thing off until he made it such a serious function. It's all such terribly short notice."

"Honestly, Dr. R," Qualia Jones shook her head, "if I minded, I wouldn't be here. It's a school night but my homework's done. Of course, I am going to charge top dollar."

Zachary smiled a rueful smile. "And here I thought this would be gratis. No, no, quite right. Quite right."

"She seems rambunctious," Qualia noted. "You know. Even more than usual."

Zachary nodded, frowning good-naturedly. "Yeah. Hallowe'en sweets, that. We hid them from her but she managed to find them, dunno how. Should have heard her. Crowing about 'buried treasure' and all."

"You gotta give her credit," Qualia noted with similarly rueful good humour, "for staying in character. Stanislavsky would be proud."

"Ah, yes," Zachary confirmed. "She's extremely Method. Insisted on wearing that to preschool this morning, haven't been able to prise her out of it."

"Such a little outlaw," Qualia chuckled.

Anna came trotting back, fuming and a little bit defeated, though she looked spectacular in her black dress. "Okay. Numbers are on the fridge. We'll be at Zach's boss' place off of Central Park West, I scribbled that one in at the bottom of the list. I tried to get the littlest scourge of The Seven Seas to promise to go to sleep if you watch Patch Boucanier 2 with her, but she wouldn't promise anything; I swear, I never thought any baby of mine would be so very incapable of compromise."

Qualia grinned. "Not to worry, Dr. and Mrs. R. I'll have her hatches battened down ere too much longer. Go on. Get on out of here."

"Aye," Zachary nodded, offering Anna his arm, grinning a massively puckish grin. "Avast."

Anna gave him her darkest look, like clouds gathering before the storm, but she couldn't help a tiny little smile as she took her husband's arm. "Oh, don't you start. Don't you dare."

********​

11:23 PM​

Qualia stirred, there in the darkness of the Rosenbaums' living room, stirring and awakening.

She blinked, and she looked blearily around herself. She was on the big soft couch.

The TV was on, but kind of humming to itself as the tape had long ago run out.

Alisa, still in costume, was absolutely passed out with her head in Qualia's lap and her arms wrapped tightly around First Mate Jack.

Carefully, very very carefully, Qualia reached over and picked up one of the couch's larger couch cushions, and, cradling Alisa's head atop one arm, she extricated herself from under the little pirate's head, slipping the cushion into place.

Alisa snuffled softly. Said something that sounded like, "shtrikeupth'colrrrs..." ...then rolled over and went back to sleep.

Qualia winced as she tried to stand. Her legs had fallen asleep and the pins and needles were bloody murder.

"Ow, ow, ow," she winced as she hobbled her way over to the great wide windows that looked out on the city.

The Rosenbaums weren't the richest people in the world, but they did okay. The apartment was nice, the view was spectacular. In fact, even in the darkness as clocks ticked and tocked towards the witching hour, she could squint and make out The Chrysler Building, the Gunga Diner balloon, Veidt Tower...

She cupped her hands around her bespectacled face and gazed out at the city.

It was beautiful. She loved the lines of it. The idea of structure and ingenuity launching skyscrapers up up up in defiance of gravity.

She loved the physics of it. She longed to understand such lofty brainy things, but despaired that such intellectual pursuits were beyond her reach...

Something flickered out in the distance.

Qualia blinked.

...11:25...

And there came a rushing like a mighty wind, a rushing and a pouring forth of power, and a great wailing scream of air that would never become gold and white light white light like the haunting ghost of a long-dead star, a star's old photograph reborn in glory and agony in the centre of Manhattan...

Qualia staggered back. "Oh, God."

...the light billowed and swallowed and a great chunk of The City That Never Sleeps vanished into that unholy macrocosmic gnawing light...

...it ate The Chrysler Building. It ate Central Park. It ate Central Park West.

It kept coming, white hot and coldblooded.

Spots danced before Qualia's eyes, there was a splitting pain slashing through three-hundred-and-sixty degrees inside her skull, pins and needles all through her head all through her skin every nerve was exploding...

"Doc," she wheezed, "Mrs. R..."

Blood was pouring from her eye sockets. Blood was pouring from her nose.

She heard the music of the spheres and it was a terrible cacophony indeed.

She fell to her knees. She fell to her hands and knees.

"Wait," she mumbled, attaining some bizarre sort of leap to understanding: "this isn't. This isn't."

She vomited. It tasted like seawater and it spattered on her hands.

She couldn't breathe.

Behind her, Alisa woke up screaming, fell off the couch, hit the floor hard.

"MUMMY!" Alisa screamed. "DADDY!"

Tears poured down Alisa's face like blood poured down Qualia's.

She held onto her little toy cat for dear life. She'd had a terrible nightmare. Tentacles and drowning. Off the edge of the map.

"Here there--" Alisa stammered, clawing at her long dark locks and trying not to choke on her own mucous. "Here there."

"Here there be monsters."

 

[ChasNicollette]

14/Oct/5, continued.

“An operator after my own heart, I want to acquire a soldier name Hausen you might have seen him on the news” she laughed to herself it was impossible anyone could have missed it, you would sooner miss the end days or a maces day float.

“If you don’t know him he’s 200 thousand pounds thirty feet tall with olive green skin”. Well that was enough for humor it was time for some more details no need to make her job any harder then it needed to be. “He should be located in the city, don’t worry I have his wireless address but getting a hold of him may be a bother”.

It was hard not to say more but she needed to gage her reaction. “By the way this is Emily hall sister of well if you don’t know me its no skin of my nose” she was tempting her she wanted her to know. Not because it was need but because she was tired of acting like the frail flower in her brothers garden.

Tick tick.

Tiktiktiktiktaktaktiktaktoktiktiktik...

The woman was talking. Qualia was listening.

But as Qualia had been listening with the phone cradled against one ear, Qualia had also been busy. She'd rolled over to the desktop with the great big-screen monitor, focused on the smaller screen therebeside, scooped an ergonomic wireless keyboard into her lap.

Her fingers moved fast. Impossibly fast. Impossibly precise.

(The very same sort of impossible speed and precision required to throw a knife and sever the head of an insect whose total body length was little more than an inch.)

Multiple myriad browser windows leapt into being on the massive screen beside her, and she took this in with her peripheral vision.

Youtube: camera-phone footage of Hausen. Three storeys tall, a hundred tons. Complexion of an M1 Abrams. Gait made a mess in its wake.

Novaexpress.com: text-based condemnation of exorbitant military spending even in the face of twenty years of relative world peace. ('Who are we fighting, aliens? Didn't we find out those weren't real?')

MTV News: correlation of Youtube footage. Not fake. Not hoax.

Cracked low-level Pentagon server: crossref files on "Project Colossus." (Couldn't get at the good stuff, only a matter of time, but time was short and this was a start.)

On the screen in front of her, she was tracing the phone number that had called her. Sat phone. Which meant she just had to follow the sat-bounces, narrow down the woman's coordinates. Once she got this narrowed down, she again employed that cracked Pentagon server, waking up a disused spy satellite that had been decommissioned in the late '80's after the reconciliations.

Yes, it wasn't brilliant. It wasn't state of the art, not anymore. But it was good enough for Qualia's purposes and no-one should notice if she borrowed it.

Clickwhirrclickwhirrclick...

Zoom in. Zoom in further...

Ahhh. There you are.

Too far up for positive ID confirmation.

But run "Emily Hall," through Nupedia.org...

One of the disambiguation results matched the figure below and its approximate physical type. And this was the sister of some publishing magnate, looked like porn...

You really can afford me. But why, dear creature, are you so interested in a holdover from Tokyo's worst nightmares?

She could have hunted in greater detail, but time was short and she had a location.

She had done much of this while Emily had been speaking.

By now, it had been seven seconds since Emily had uttered the word "nose."

Getting slow in your old age, Jones.

"Right," she declared, "stay put. Need ten-to-fifteen to get in motion. Laptops, assorted other gear. I'll call you on the road from a scrambled cell. (Better give me that wireless address.) Can you stay where you are for the time being?"

 

[thewhiterabbit8]

And now, the end is near;
And so I face the final curtain.
My friend, Ill say it clear,
Ill state my case, of which Im certain.

She licked her hand trying to get the last few bits of burnt dog out of the wound "stay put. Need ten-to-fifteen to get in motion. Laptops, assorted other gear. I'll call you on the road from a scrambled cell. (Better give me that wireless address.) Can you stay where you are for the time being?" you know dog was a lot like gum, well it was when deep fired and flying at a hundred miles an hour.

Ive lived a life thats full.
Ive traveled each and evry highway;
And more, much more than this,
I did it my way

Her mind had to jog a little faster then the rest of her body to keep up the poison was slowly leaving her body. “Sure maybe I could build a high rise, or a strip mall, just be quick I think the roaches are getting ready to revolt” she laughed it was a bad habit to laugh at her own jokes but she was a creature of habit.

Regrets, Ive had a few;
But then again, too few to mention.
I did what I had to do
And saw it through without exemption

Most of her conscious time was spent playing tick tack toe on the street no cars, at least no working ones. The rest of the time she was living in her memories, she found sadly none of them were happy.

I planned each charted course;
Each careful step along the byway,
But more, much more than this,
I did it my way

The first was her oldest memory her father had named her Emily after first naming her brother despite the fact she was older by one full minute. Erick had been a crier and would remain so for the rest of his short life. He would cry at almost anything, being left alone, a stiff breeze or even milk who cries at milk.

Yes, there were times, Im sure you knew
When I bit off more than I could chew.
But through it all, when there was doubt,
I ate it up and spit it out.
I faced it all and I stood tall;
And did it my way.

The car that crawled up the street hit her causing her to fall onto the front window hard “head chika I think it’s a senuretia she is all tapped up”. One man pulled of her shirt her eyes rolled back as the man tossed her into the back. She felt hands on her body as the car was turned off and the seat pushed back. “Rocko I don’t want no scantly clad white bitch in my father’s car” complained some girl.

Ive loved, Ive laughed and cried.
Ive had my fill; my share of losing.
And now, as tears subside,
I find it all so amusing

“Look bitch I don’t care” she felt his hand travel up her leg as she looked into the girl’s eyes. You going to take that from him she thought focusing on the girl as much as she could. “I am you’re girlfriend not you’re driver” she spoke through the woman’s voice. She had the girl bite him on the arm using the split second opening to kick him in the stomach.

To think I did all that;
And may I say - not in a shy way,
No, oh no not me,
I did it my way

As he fell over she crawled out of the car into a phone booth pressing her foot against the joint to keep it shut. The man still bleeding was hitting his girlfriend even after the cops showed up. A lining of hooker advertisements hid her as she tried to put her self into working order. She sighed that was over now back to the Hauser issue.

For what is a man, what has he got?
If not himself, then he has naught.
To say the things

“I hope you get here soon” she told herself as she called for some food she was hungry enough to eat what was left of the dog.

he truly feels;
And not the words of one who kneels.
The record shows I took the blows -
And did it my way!

the song finally ended "guess i get free bred sticks with my rescue" she laughed passing out.

 

[Abraxas Winterlight]

Det. Adrian Cavanaugh 10/14/05 2:27AM

"Rorschach Lives."

I hit the mouse again, playing the file that dispatch had sent to me.

Dozens of fakes had sprung up in Kovacs wake over the last twenty years. Some obvious fruitcakes, some just looking for a excuse to hurt people.

The dangerous ones were the ones that thought he was doing the right thing. That his work got cut short and decided to take it upon themselves to continue his killing spree on the underworld.

My predecessor had caught three that were in that league. Two gunned down resisting arrest, one died in prison awaiting trial.

Now I had two of the bad ones operating in my city at the same time.

Mom told me not to stop going to mass. Guess I pissed off God.


I picked up the file on the car-b-que the night before. Six gang-bangers roasted alive, one in the hospital with severe spine and brain damage, not expected to live through the night. Rorschach number one. Same level of violence as the Tony Two Shoes murder, (bled out from internal damage as his size twelve was shoved up his rectum, tearing up his guts. Seems Tony liked young boys, and was pretty sick with what he did to them) and the Harlem rapist (Coroner said he had exactly 27 unbroken bones in his body).

This guy played rough. Very very rough. And according to the Chopper patrol that spotted him he had some nifty toys too. High-tech stuff.

Number two was different. Violence was more primal. Broken bones almost smashed to powder. Mostly street thugs, muggers and gang-bangers that roughed up people in the park.

Only killed one person, another child rapist who had a abducted six year old back in the bushes. We found him in a tree.
And on some rocks.
And in a birdbath.
And all over the ground. Ripped apart. Coroner couldn't tell me what happened. said it looked like he was killed and tossed into the hyena cage of the zoo.

Little girl just said a good monster told her to close her eyes and killed the bad man. All she could say was it was black and big. BOLO in the park for a large black man, but in my gut I am sure thats not what little Chastity was talking about.

Now this. Three members of the Latin Kings were just taken down, very similar to my Central Park Rorschach. I git the audio of the phone call (throwaway cell, no way to trace it) and had the preliminary report from the on-scene officers on my screen (the new IGen system that we had was wonderful. Cops typed out a quick report and if you had the right passcodes you could be getting it seconds after the street cop hit enter.)

I was picking up my hat and coat when my pocket buzzed. I reached down and pulled out my cell.

"Cavanaugh."

"Detective, there is a disturbance at Eighth and Green. Officers ran into a suspect matching the description of the guy that trashed those Kings earlier. One officer down, concussion, but the other one is in foot pursuit. We have four black and whites en-route. You want in on the party?"

"I'm on my way Wilkins. Nobody talks to this guy until I get there."

I snapped the phone closed and dropped it in my pocket as I grabbed my hat and coat and tore out of the room.

Maybe tomorrow I would only have one problem to deal with.