The Final Story of Salvador Roberts

ONE

"Die, demon!"  Akira slashed forward, his enormous sword gleaming in the moonlight.

Yuriko frowned and side stepped his thrust easily.  Akira immediately shifted into a backswing, bending gravity to increase the force of impact. Yuriko simply blocked the strike with her forearm.  Her arm's small bracer cracked a bit, but Yuriko herself seemed unfazed.  She glanced at her bracer.

"Hmm... cute," she said flatly.  Akira immediately leaped back and prepared another thrust.  He shifted his weight forward, bending gravity once more to increase his pull towards his target.  Yuriko stood there impassively.  The split second he began to shift forward, Yuriko suddenly appeared less than an inch from him. Akira's eyes barely had time to widen before her open palm smashed into his face.  Akira shot straight across the street, slamming through the display window of the store that was there.  Akira managed to maintain his wits enough to make a gravity field which took away his inertia.  So, rather than continue to smash through the building, he simply dropped to the ground.  After a moment, he struggled to his feet, glaring at Yuriko.

"All my years of training, and it still amounts to nothing!" he said.  He cursed.  He was holding back.  This was not the time for conservative displays of power.  Obviously the full force of his Elemental Key must be brought forth.  He reached for his sword and blinked when he realized it wasn't with him.

Yuriko hefted the enormous blade in her hand.  "This is lovely craftwork," she stated.  With a single hand, she did a few practice swings.  Akira couldn't help but feel slightly intimidated.  The sword literally weighed half a ton.  Akira himself could only wield it due to constantly using his gravity powers to make it light as a feather.  And here, this small woman wielded it with all the effort of a weightlifter wielding a toothpick.  She was indeed an above average demon.

Yuriko glanced from the sword to Akira.  She smiled humorlessly.  "Come now, human.  I do believe a fight between you and myself would be pointless.  I have no specific desire to harm you, and though you may wield the Moon Key, I could easily break you in half."  Yuriko casually tossed the sword at Akira.  Akira caught it, wobbling only slightly as he adapted his power to the added weight.  In the split second he was preoccupied with readjusting himself, Yuriko was suddenly less than a foot in front of him again, standing as though she hadn’t moved at all.

Akira grimaced as Yuriko leaned forward.  She had to float a few feet off the ground to bring herself eye to eye with him; for a moment, both human and demon suddenly realized the comical perspective of this fight: Akira, the one wielding the 8 foot blade which it would take three men to lift, the one who stood a full two heads taller than his opponent, and at least a foot broader, was being stared down by a small, cute, and seemingly harmless young woman.  Yuriko smiled with a slight giggle. “That said, I do admire your enthusiasm. And the size of your… sword…”

…

…

Oh, for fuck’s sake! Who would even read this crap?

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***

There was a long, exasperated sigh. Salvador Roberts took his hands off the keyboard and sagged back in his chair. He stared at the ceiling with an expression not unlike someone who just discovered his car had gotten side-swiped. He grit his teeth for a moment, bringing his hands to his forehead and closed his eyes, letting out a second long sigh.

Why was it always so shit? Everything he wrote, just drab and cliché and boring as fuck. For weeks now, he’d been attempting to fulfill the demands of the nagging voice in his head, pestering him constantly to write, write, write, and every day, he stared at a blank screen until he was fuming and had to quit, or he managed to scrape out a few paragraphs, only to feel so fed up and revolted with his own lack of ability, he wanted to throw his laptop through the wall.

Why did this still plague him? If he was smart, he would have quit trying to be a writer back when he was twenty and become an accountant. Instead, he’d pissed away his college degree working dead-end retail jobs, while telling himself he was going to put his real focus on writing, and maybe drawing, and maybe some computer programming. For as long as he could remember, telling stories had always been his passion. Except…

He hadn’t drawn any comics since he was a child, and what little skill he’d started to develop rusted away completely over the years.

He had made a total of two games on a cheap game maker program, and quit on the alpha versions of each, never to finish them up.

He’d written a few dozen very terrible short stories in his teens and early twenties, then maybe a quarter as many from his twenties to his mid-thirties. After that, he had stalled completely. Forty years old, never published, never even self-published, unless one counted the little blog that no one, not even his friends, ever looked at.

What the hell had he done with himself? Where the fuck did all that time go? For the hundredth, for the thousandth, for the ten thousandth time, he reflected on all the wasted hours of his life spent making up characters and worlds, but never actually figuring out the stories to use them in. All the times he just got so frustrated, he had to quit and cool off with video games and YouTube. All the times he realized nothing was going to come together that day, and maybe things would work out the next day after some sleep.

Such habits became an easy trap to fall into, merely exacerbating the situation. Playing video games didn’t help him organize his thoughts, nor did watching videos inspire him. Instead, they just numbed him to his frustration and distracted him from having to think. Giving up and trying again the next never helped him get a fresh perspective. Sleep temporarily cleared the anger, but the ideas never clicked any better.

He knew it was a vicious cycle. Put himself in a situation that he knew gave him terrible anxiety. Then work himself up until his blood pressure was through the roof. Then rely on his digital opiates to calm down. And the next time he tried again, he’d be that much further behind. And the few times he had finally managed to write something, he felt like he’d have been better off not bothering, making all his efforts feel all the more futile.

And yet, he couldn’t quit. Like some kind of drug addict, he found himself unable to stop thinking about his stories. With no career ambitions, no desire for a family, he had nothing to really do other than waste the days away on entertainment when he wasn’t at work. He wished he could just be one of those normal people who was completely contented to do their job and just enjoy his shows and games because it was just fun.

But no. Every show he watched, every book he read, every comic he read, every game he played, even if he enjoyed them, it made his gut churn thinking about how he wasn’t making those things himself.

So it was back to the keyboard, back to the sketch pad, back to the writing forums to try and churn the ideas in his head. And the older he got, the stronger the barrier grew. His ideas all seemed so well-realized in his head, but when he actually tried to write them, the characters were all too boring and cliché. The narratives he came up with were the most rote, generic schlock even a vapid Saturday morning cartoon show would consider trite.

He kept trying to find ways to change the settings to make them interesting, but it was useless when he had no actual stories to set there. He tried to force himself to just throw characters together into a generic plot and hope some kind of chemistry would emerge between them to make it entertaining. But he had too many characters and settings to choose from, and none of them really ever resonated with him when he really thought about it.

He told himself that he didn’t need to be original, he just needed to find that one spark, that one gimmick, something he hadn’t seen done before that would get him hooked, and keep him hooked. But he’d already overexposed himself to the genres he was obsessed with, and could never find anything that held his attention long enough to fully develop. Hell, he even tried writing different genres, but every time, he just kept falling back to his writing obsession: superheroes and adventurers.

He stared at the screen, re-reading the short piece he’d just typed. Who the fuck were these characters? Why did they have generic anime names? Why did the dialogue read like the script for a B-movie? As his eyes skimmed back over the words, he felt the frustration boil up from inside.

It was shit. IT WAS ALL SHIT! What the fuck was he doing with his life? Why did he waste his days getting depressed over fucking power fantasy bullshit instead of getting his life together and finding a real job? Why had the one thing that used to give him joy when he was young become so fucking toxic that the thought of trying to write a novel or a web series or anything, make him want to drive a screwdriver through his brain? He knew other writers had problems, but Jesus Fucking Christ, surely most of them weren’t like this, were they? Maybe that’s why all the greats ended up turning to drink and blowing their brains out. He was going to end up going down that route, he just knew it, and the saddest part is, he wouldn’t even have a fucking novel published to have made the struggle worth it!

Sal shoved his laptop onto the simple wooden table the served as his desk, slapping it closed. He pushed the table back so he could lower the footrest of his recliner and stand up. He winced as a little stab of pain shot through his knee, and he hissed out a curse. Fuck, he wouldn’t need to blow his brains out. His own body was falling apart so bad, he’d probably have a heart attack in a few years. Obesity, depression, and shitty hours at dead end jobs had all exacerbated the self-induced stress of his creative failures, leading to very little motivation to regularly take care of himself. Only the gnawing anxiety of his mortality made him half-heartedly try to eat healthy or go for walks sometimes, but it was never enough to keep from backsliding soon after. Now, knowing the last thing he needed was another soda, he had just wound himself up so badly that heavily sweetened carbonation was the only thing that would calm him down before he strangled someone. At least the walk to the corner store would count as exercise, right?

Sal shuffled over to his bedroom to get dressed; he didn’t see much reason to wear more than his boxers when he was alone in his dingy one-bedroom apartment. He pulled on a pair of grey gym shorts and a wrinkly green tee-shirt off his bed. He slipped on some sandals, knowing they wouldn’t be good for his flatfoot condition, but figuring the walk was so short, he’d just bull through the pain. He debated putting on some extra deodorant, then shrugged and figured the short trip wouldn’t warrant it. He’d put some on twelve hours ago and hadn’t sweat that much today. Fuck it.

Grabbing his wallet and keys from the kitchen counter, he debated grabbing his phone, but noticed it was almost dead. Goddamn it, he’d forgotten to charge it again. Whatever. He’d be back in a few minutes. Fuck it. He plugged it in the socket and went out the door.

The apartment was on the northernmost end of a six-building complex, on the third floor. The nearest convenience store/gas station was about three blocks away, if he went out the nearest exit, walked along a neighborhood road until it ended, continued onto a business road, and cut across an empty lot. Thankfully, it was already eleven at night, and in this small town, most people were shut in, save for the lone McDonalds, and the gas stations near the highway.

Sal grumbled a bit as he shuffled down the stairs and casually strolled towards the QuickTrip, where the sodas were cheapest. The night air was a bit warm, but with a cool breeze, and he took several calming breaths as the walk got his blood pumping.

Why did he torment himself like this? Why couldn’t he just write a goddamned story? It didn’t have to be good. It didn’t have to be original. It didn’t have to be tied down to the cluster fuck of canons he’d set up for all his worlds and characters that he never did anything with anyway. Shit, he could just list the top 100 most interesting characters and the top 10 most interesting worlds, and just some dice, and try to work with whatever combo he got. It would just be for practice, and who knows it might go somewhere if it—

“Stop,” growled Sal, cutting off his own thoughts. He’d tried all that before. He’d tried all the advice before. “Just stop. Enough. Give it a fucking rest. Other people have real fucking problems like trying to feed their kids, and you’re giving yourself a stroke over what to have a cartoon supervillain do in a comic book you’re never going to draw. Jesus. Just go get a Dr. Pepper and stop going crazy for five fucking minutes.”

He sneered ruefully at the ground. “I mean, hey, look on the bright side, Sal, maybe this will be the Dr. Pepper that finally gives you diabetes, and you can go into a fucking coma tonight and die, and then you won’t have to worry about writing ever again.”

That morbid pep-talk aside, Sal continued onward in silence, content he’d already convinced his neighbors he was a nutcase long ago. He reached the section of road to cross over, and quickly went across the street, mostly by habit since there were no cars anyway. He came to the edge of the lot, an old parking lot where a dollar store had once been stationed. It had been scrapped a year ago, but they’d never replaced the spot, leaving a weed-spotted, cracked blacktop that sat adjacent to the large, recently remodeled QT station. The lot’s entrance was blocked off with a chain strung up between two metal posts to keep people from driving in, but no one had bothered to actually put up a fence around the property. Sal, like any efficiency-minded pedestrian, found it easier to just cut across it to reach the QT property from the back, then to bother walking down the rest of the road and following the turn to reach the gas station the normal way. Technically, it was trespassing, but nobody really cared that much as long as people didn’t try to park or loiter there, so Sal felt free to take the short cut for now. It was certainly easier on his foot.

When he got about halfway across the lot, however, he was startled by a flash of light. He looked around, but the two shops flanking the lot were dark, and the street lights hadn’t changed. He looked up, but noted there were barely any clouds in the sky. There was, however, a star directly overhead which seemed to be glittering with all sorts of colors. It also seemed to be getting brighter. Originally a button-sized glint, it grew to the size of a softball before Sal realized it wasn’t a star at all, and it was a lot closer than he’d first guessed with only the night sky in the background.

His eyes widened and he scrambled back, whipping his arms up to protect his head. He felt something hard and hot strike his forearms, and a jolt shot through him as though he’d just been struck with a stun gun. He tried to let out a shout, but the breath seemed to be knocked out of him. His vision swam with a rapidly shifting rainbow of colors, and he felt a heady rush like a sharp drop in blood pressure. He managed a single gasp, before everything went dark.

TWO

Sal groaned awake, hearing the sounds of birds chirping. He was laying on his stomach, and he winced as he started to roll onto his back; aches and pains along his back and sides informed him that he’d been sleeping in a terribly awkward position. He was also vaguely aware that his right hand hurt. This was followed by the realization that he wasn’t even fully on the bed; as he rolled, he realized he was already half hanging off, and he ended up sliding all the way down. He gave a loud grunt as he plopped onto the floor, and the metal frame of the futon dug uncomfortably into his back. He half-rolled/half-scooted forward a bit and sat with his legs to the side, propped up with his left elbow.

As his senses came to, he realized he must have just fallen face first onto the bed, with at least one leg up to his hips hanging off. He also realized he was holding something in his right hand. He looked down, raising his hand to see what looked like a clump of spiky, iridescent crystal, gripped tightly in his hand. It was about the size of a tennis ball and weighing about a pound. He also realized he was holding it in a near death-grip. His tendons ached from the strain, and the ends of the spikes dug into his flesh.

He let go of the thing, wincing as the pain flared a bit. He rubbed the skin, noting the red little pits where the spikes had dug into, but they didn’t seem to actually be that sharp; none had actually pierced him, despite how tightly he gripped it. He stood up, wincing from the aches, and looked around, still feeling a bit addled.

He noticed he was still wearing his clothes, and several streaks of dirt were on them, as well as bits of grit from the cracked asphalt of the lot. Stepping out of his bedroom, he almost jumped as he noticed his apartment door was wide open, his keys still dangling in the lock, and all his lights were on. He quickly glanced around, feeling a well up of panic at the thought of an intruder. The small apartment had only one real room other than his bedroom and the bathroom; the living room was separated from the kitchen/dining space by a half-wall, so at only took a glance to see that no one else was there. Looking across from his bedroom, the bathroom door was open, revealing that, too, was unoccupied. That left only the slim closet behind him, though that had enough shelves spaced down the length even a little kid would have a hard time hiding in there. He opened it cautiously anyway, and was relieved to see no one had somehow contorted themselves to fit.

He crept to the front door, expecting at any moment for a robber to jump out from around the doorframe, or from some heretofore unknown nook of his apartment, and bean him on the head. But no one was there. The apartment didn’t even look like anyone had gone through it; nothing was missing that he could tell at a glance, even his laptop and phone were was where he’d left them. Plus his keys were still in the door. What the hell happened? He’d been walking towards the QT, when…

…when a ball of light had struck him, and he’d suddenly lost consciousness. Holy fuck, had he just had a seizure? He used to room with a guy who had those, and he remembered said roommate would usually be able to act after one had passed, but not remember what happened for a few hours afterwards. Sal wondered if this was the same. Had he had an attack, and just stumbled his way back to the apartment and collapsed?

Oh, good God, that’s just what he needed. Fat, bad joints, and now seizures. If one more fucking thing went wrong with his body this year, he was going to throw himself off a building. Of course, with his luck, he’d probably survive by some miracle, and have to spend the rest of his life quadriplegic. With a grunt of aggravation that didn’t quite fully tamp down the looming existential dread of his mortality, he quickly went to the door, pulled out his keys, and shut and locked it. He went over to his phone and noted it was fully charged.

5:30 am. Normally, he’d be getting to sleep around this time, so he could make it to his nightshift at work. Well, he was only a little tired now. He figured he should stay up long enough to call his doctor and make an appointment, and just pray nothing else fucked up happened to him. If he was lucky, he could get in right away, and have an excuse to call in sick. Still, the office didn’t open for another three hours, and, taking a moment to check himself over and assess his general sense of being, he didn’t think he needed to go to the emergency room. Better to get another few hours of sleep, properly positioned this time. He still felt sore where his muscles had been bent weird while he was unconscious.

He took the phone with him and went into the bedroom, where he stopped short. The weird, iridescent crystal was nestled on the bunched up cover. In his sudden freak out over his health, he’d forgotten all about it.

Where had it come from? Had it been on the ground in the lot somewhere, and he’d just grabbed it? Wait… he remembered, the ball of light had been coming at him, and he’d shielded himself; he’d felt something strike his arm, something hard and hot. He checked his arms, but didn’t see any marks to indicate an impact. If a one-pound crystal ball had just fallen out of the sky, fast enough to be glowing as it went, it would have instantly killed him, punched through his body like an oversized bullet. There was no way he’d actually been struck. The light and heat and that weird electric jolt must have been the seizure. Oh, god, the seizure. Did they come with hallucinations? Oh, Jesus, maybe he’d had a stroke? Wait, no, a stroke would have left him debilitated, surely…

Sal sighed and picked up the crystal, looking it over. Examining it more closely, it reminded him somewhat of the inside of a geode, those colored crystal formations inside a smooth stone you’d sometimes see in a novelty shop. The thing felt like a real mineral, not just cheap plastic or glass, but it didn’t look like anything other than a fancy paperweight or desk ornament. Someone had to have just picked this up at a novelty shop and dropped it somewhere. Hopefully, his black out wanderings hadn’t included a rummage through a dumpster.

Sal sighed again and set the crystal on the little bedside table next to the futon, next to the lamp. He shook his head, confused, and just felt tired again. He double checked his door, clicked off all his lights, and went back to bed, ignoring the tweeting of the morning birds.

THREE

The doctor wouldn’t be able to see him until Monday at the earliest, and it was only Tuesday afternoon. After nearly oversleeping, Sal hastily showered, threw on his usual black slacks and red shirt for work, scarfed down a ham and cheese sandwich and ice coffee, and headed off. The Arthur’s Off-Price Clothing store at the edge of town was a bit of a drive during the lunch rush, but he managed to reach the store at 1:59, just barely clocking in on time.

He was in the stockroom again. Thankfully, by this time, the truck was already in, and most of the goods unboxed, leaving him to hang the clothes. He smiled and greeted two of his co-workers running out carts of kitchen appliances and make-up, two older Russian ladies who didn’t speak English very well. He was the only male employee other than one of the managers, and half of his co-workers didn’t speak English as a first language. On a later shift like this, he didn’t get much opportunity to make conversation. In the mornings, he usually chatted with the receiving and processing team, but they were already off by now.

That suited him just fine. He was still worried about his possible seizure, and despite that, he still felt some residual self-loathing from his failed attempt to write yesterday. He tried to ignore his feelings and just let the repetitive task of hanging clothes dull his emotions. It was tedious work, and it got aggravating when the task inevitably triggered the tendonitis in his arms after an hour or two, but at least here, he was making some money, and had an excuse to not be creative.

He got a half-hour of work in, when his manager Samantha came in to check the progress of the stockroom. As usual, the store was too short staffed to have gotten all the product out when it was supposed to be, and Sal and the afternoon floor shift were expected to pick up the slack.

“Hey, Sal, what’s up?” said Samantha with her typical costumer-satisfying smile.

“Everything sucks and I want to die,” he said with a grin and a pleasant tone. “How are you?”

“Oh, you know, I think I already died, and now I just haunt the place,” she said. “Well, we got plenty of clothes to hang. Two girls called off up front, so we’ll need you to back up cashier today, too.”

Sal sighed. “Yeah. I figured.”

“Hey, look on the bright side, its job security,” she said with a practiced laugh.

Sal just grumbled in a comically exaggerated way, but they both knew he wasn’t really joking. Samantha grumbled along with him.

“So, did you hear about that bank robbery this morning?” she said.

Sal frowned. “Nah. I’m always missing the headlines. Where and when?”

“Eight this morning, over at the First National. Craziest thing, two lunatics just bust in, dressed up like supervillains. Like they escaped from a comic convention or something.”

Sal paused, raising an eyebrow. “Really?”

“Yeah, I’m serious. Some people got some video on their phones, and it even shows this one woman, she shoots fire from her hands! She must have had some kind of flamethrower get up, it’s hard to tell because the footage is really shaky.”

Sal blinked and stared at her. “You’re pulling my leg.”

Samantha held up her hand. “I swear to you, when you go on break, check it out on YouTube. The other guy was dressed in green and had some kind of whip thing on his back.”

“And they just… robbed a bank… in broad daylight?”

“Crazy, I know.”

“That’s… I mean, why didn’t the cops shoot them?”

Samantha blinked. “They did. The woman started throwing fire, and the green guy whipped some of the cops that got near them, and they let loose.” She shook her head. “Seriously, go watch the footage.”

Sal glanced at the clock. He had two hours before his break, but he always kept his phone on him anyway. Once Samantha left, he turned the phone on, muted it, and searched the video with one hand, hanging a piece of clothing between the page loads. He was low on data for the rest of the month, but he was too curious to wait until his break, much less to reach a wi-fi spot. He found the results immediately, “Supervillains Attack Bank In Fulton, Missouri.” He clicked the first video.

The sound was off, but he could just imagine people shouting. Whoever was holding the phone was sitting in the lobby of the bank, and about two-dozen people, bank staff and clients, could be seen sitting along the walls. Two tellers were at their counter, where a tall, thin man in a full-body green costume was gesturing menacingly. On his back was a thick, green cord running down his spine, and extending off his tail bone, arcing upward another four feet, until it terminated at a wide pad, almost like a squid’s longer tentacle. Except instead of suction cups, the “tail” ended with a huge gleaming spike. The tail weaved a bit back and forth, and jabbed forward a few times as the man yelled at the tellers, as if to punctuate his words. He then turned to shout something at the customers, and the video showed his head was adorned with a wide green mask modeled to look like the head of a cobra, the man’s face framed by the snake’s maw. There were even fake fangs extending down from the brim of the mask’s upper jaw, silvery like the tail spike, but painted red at the tips.

Sal’s jaw dropped, as did the shirt he was midway through hanging. The camera was already swinging away from the counter to focus on the second attacker. The person holding the phone must have been trembling with fear or just didn’t think to try and steady their hand, but Sal saw enough to recognize a woman dressed in a bright red body stocking, so tight it may as well have been painted on. It covered her entire body, including a hood that only exposed her face. Along the arms were a series of short spikes, more for decoration than anything. She held up her hands, and the camera tried to focus on them, showing the cloth-covered fingers surrounded by flames. Then the camera jerked to the side slightly, as the fire-wielding woman yelled at the person holding the phone. For a moment, the camera zoomed in, showing the woman’s eyes were a bright yellow, with slitted pupils like a viper. Then there was a bright orange flash, and the video cut out.

Sal gawked. He searched for more clips, ignoring the clothing. Most were just repostings of the previous video, but he did manage to find a second shot from another angle. This person was able to hold their phone steady, either letting it rest inconspicuously against their leg or just holding it in place, with the base resting on the floor. From the angle, they were sitting where the counter met the wall, backed into the corner, opposite the first camera. Unfortunately, the angle of the shot was such that it was tilted too far back, and only got a view of the fire-wielding woman from the back as she held up her flaming hands, then thrust them at someone along the opposite wall, probably the first camera person.

The shot changed as the person shifted, causing the phone to flip up and point the camera at the ceiling. A dark skinned girl could be seen for a moment leaning over the phone and picking it up, tilting it back to see the scene, but now going too far so only the man and woman’s hips and legs were visible. It was enough to see that a melting puddle of burning plastic was on the floor, and several people were cowering against the opposite wall, a teenaged boy clutching his sizzling hand in pain. The fire woman had destroyed his phone and burned his hand in the process.

The footage showed the legs of the green-dressed man with the tail moving towards the fire woman. Her legs turned to face his, paused, and then the two bolted out the door, the bottom of a dark blue duffle bag resting against the green man’s hip. The phone fell downwards onto the floor and the video cut out there.

Sal stood, staring open mouthed at the phone. He re-watched both clips, and those seemed to be the only two currently available. No doubt the news would show something from the security cameras soon. Sal was so engrossed, he didn’t hear them paging for him to go upfront to help ring until the third attempt. He hastily shoved his phone in his pocket and headed out the stockroom before Samantha had to drag him out.

The woman obviously didn’t have a flamethrower on her. The man’s spike-tail didn’t look like some cheap prop; it moved to smoothly, as if it were a natural appendage. But that wasn’t what stunned Sal the most.

What stunned him was that he recognized them. They were his characters. There was no mistaking it, unless someone, through sheer cosmic coincidence, had created costumes that looked just like the doodles he’d drawn back in elementary school. Even with the weirdness of seeing them as real-life-looking people in costumes instead of crappy drawings, even though they were characters he hadn’t even thought about in almost twenty-five years, he knew that they were the characters he had made up, come to life. He knew it with a certainty beyond just recognition.

Flara, a psychotic, pyrokinetic killer. Sal was almost shocked she hadn’t torched the whole building with everyone inside as soon as they left, but he figured the cops must have already shown up by then.

Scorpion, the lithe, but super strong crook, with a cyborg scorpion tail strong enough to smash through cars and fire off bolts of lightning. The green man hadn’t had a chance to show off his powers in the video, but the tail had looked real enough.

Sal spent the rest of his shift in almost a daze, re-watching the footage several times during his break and checking for any updates. All he found were articles saying that the two costumed crazies had been killed, but not before Flara had blown up five cars with fireballs and set a cop and two pedestrians ablaze. In that time, Scorpion had smashed straight through one of the cop cars and gored three officers with his tail. There was no mention of him throwing lightning, but apparently, one cop who’d missed getting stabbed, but took a glancing blow from the tail spike, had been stunned is if hit by a tazer.

After which, the five remaining officers unloaded on the two, as did a civilian who’d had a handgun. Sal remembered Scorpion’s costume was supposed to be bullet proof, but apparently, one shot had hit his unprotected face, striking right between the eyes. Flara hadn’t been protected at all; in the comics, she would have used her fire to vaporize the bullets before they hit, but in real life, apparently, the cops were faster on the draw.

Sal was tempted to leave work early, but what, exactly, was there to do? There was just no way his old comic book villain characters had come to life and attacked a bank. No fucking way, no matter how weirdly certain he was. Well, whoever they really were, they were dead now. What exactly was he going to do, go to the cops and demand to see the bodies? How would that even actually confirm anything?

This had to be something else. Somehow a coincidence, that two wackos dressed like two of his old comic book characters, and displayed similar powers. To be fair, he’d always been terrible at costume design, and the two had pretty generic action-figure looks to them. Maybe as a kid, he’d just ripped off some obscure 80’s cartoon characters and had forgotten that fact after all these years. That had to be it.

The bigger ramifications, of course, that regardless of explanation, this meant that there were apparently real-life superhumans in existence, that he couldn’t quite parse. Despite seeing the raw footage from the phone cams, it was a step too far. There had to be some trick to it. He could buy some kind of advanced prosthetic for the green-man’s tail. He was willing to accept that. Maybe the fire woman actually had some kind of special-effects flammable gel coating her hands, and one of the arm spikes was a sparker?

It was 2015, it wasn’t that unreasonable a level of technology, right? That didn’t explain the wilder claims of the police reports, but maybe those were exaggerated? Or maybe this all secretly was some kind of movie publicity stunt? Sal could not imagine why such a thing would be happening in this Podunk town of all places, but…

He realized his heart was thudding in his chest and he was almost getting short of breath. He decided to just finish his shift and try not to drive himself crazy anticipating the next news update. They probably wouldn’t release any new info before tomorrow anyway. Then he’d see what this was really about.

Unless he was actually dreaming right now, and was still unconscious in that empty lot behind the QuickTrip. If so, this was the longest, most realistic, and most confusingly consistent dream he’d ever had.

FOUR

It was already night again by the time Sal got home, and he went straight for his laptop, plopping down on the chair and impatiently drumming his fingers while the little computer struggled out of standby. He was going to have to get a new one of these soon.

He expected to see more about the bank robbery, but his eyes widened as Yahoo! Articles revealed an even more alarming headline: “Strange Sightings In Fulton, MO. Superhumans and Monsters Run Amok!”

He blinked. What the fuck was this? He clicked the link, and his jaw dropped once more. The article itself was just a quick paragraph, barely a caption, but hosted a slideshow of pictures and video clips, taken from various phones and security cameras. Sal clicked through them all, feeling a mixed pang of confusion, excitement, and shock with each one.

Several pictures showed people in colorful costumes flying through the air. He recognized all of them; the red-white-and-blue clad American Soldier. The white-and-glowing-blue Captain Powerfist. Spellcaster, in her navy and green body suit and black cape. Hot-Head, in his black costume and red cape, his hair a streak of fire left in his wake. The Golden Man, with his gleaming gold armor, propelled by small energy rockets on his boots.

Other pictures showed strange sightings on the ground. Two or three separate shots of a large man-lizard creature slinking through the trees; Lizardo. An enormous hulking man appearing to be made of living ice carved into the form of a giant; Glacier. A monstrous skeletal humanoid with a snake-like skull, wreathed in black smoke and hovering over the town graveyard; Corpse-Eater. Thankfully, that last shot was from a considerable distance. Sal was astounded some of these characters hadn’t gotten into fights or caused more any trouble yet, like Flara and Scorpion. Maybe they were biding their time, or maybe they were still confused as to where they were.

One of the video flips showed a less flamboyant looking hero, a man in jeans and a leather jacket with spiked up black hair named Max-Out. The video showed him stopping a car crash by running with super speed in front of a van that had run a red light and bringing it a halt, just before it would have run a smaller car in the side. The scene had played out in the background of a girl doing a vlog at a nearby restaurant, her back to the scene. It wasn’t until a commotion picked up from other passerby that she turned around and tried to film the rest, but by then, Max-Out had already disappeared in a blur of motion.

By this time of night, the weight of the day usually had him feeling too tired to want to leave the apartment, even if he didn’t fall asleep right away. But seeing all this, he felt a nervous exhilaration that had him wired up like an energy drink binge. These were all his characters, mostly old ideas from when he was a kid, though a couple characters were more recent. People were running into them on the streets, taking pictures. This couldn’t be happening. He had to try and find one of them so he could talk to them. So far, the majority of the characters he recognized as superheroes, but a few had been villains. Corpse-Eater in particular, he was more than a little surprised hadn’t already tried turning every body in that graveyard into an undead army to march on the town.

He stood up, ready to run out the door, but paused. How, exactly was he going to find any of them, at this time of night? Maybe they’d been out scouting earlier today, and that’s what got them spotted. He hadn’t seen or run into any of them on the drive home. If they were hiding out somewhere, he doubted he was going to find them. None of them, that he could recall, would have a particular preference for places to hole up. These were old characters from a simpler time; he hadn’t exactly dug too deeply when it came to their development or personalities. Max-Out, maybe, he was more recent. Where would Max-Out go? A cheap motel, probably. He’d done that in one story where he’d been bounced to an alternate Earth.

He went to the door and grabbed the handle, when a second pang of doubt hit him. What, exactly, was he going to do if he did find one of them? “Hey, Captain Powerfist, you won’t believe me, but I’m your creator, and I need you to get back into my head.” Then another concern: just because they looked like his characters and demonstrated the same abilities, didn’t mean they actually were his characters. However it had been done, someone had yanked the concepts out of his mind, but that didn’t mean they weren’t actually robots or aliens posing as his creations. Sure, Flara and Scorpion had reverted to type, trying to rob a bank, but that could have just been some kind of test.

Test or not though, he had to do something. All of his characters were superhuman to one degree or another. Men and women like Captain Powerfist, American Solider, Spellcaster, Corpse Eater, they were somewhere in the range Superman level. Assuming any of them got into a fight with one another, the resulting collateral damage and loss of life would be at natural disaster levels. Nuclear bomb levels. Even the lesser of his characters, even one-note thugs like Flara and Scorpion, they’d managed to kill several people and destroy vehicles in the space of a few seconds, before they’d been put down.

Sal felt a tingle of dread. Oh, god, would they start fighting? Corpse Eater, Golden Man, Lizardo, they were all bad guys, and each could be a threat to a whole city, and none were particularly against just wrecking shit for the sake of it. How had they not gotten into a massive battle already?

Unless they weren’t permanent. Unless they were blinking in and out of existence. Or they were just a handful of beings shifting from one form to another. Or maybe they’re powers weren’t nearly as effective in the real world. Flara and Scorpion’s abilities, they had been pretty minor, nothing too physics-breaking, as it were. American Soldier, however, was one of those ridiculous old school flying power men, able to pick up a skyscraper and swing it around like a baseball bat. He didn’t know how real world physics would interact with such a power. Maybe it wouldn’t, and their crazier abilities would be severely hampered. But then again, Max-Out’s powers were in the same ballpark, if more limited in function, and he’d used his powers just fine in that one video clip. Although, it had just been stopping a car, that wasn’t too crazy either.

Sal stood there, still holding the door knob, his thoughts a whirl. What the fuck was he going to do? What could he do? A fat schlub with bad joints, cruising around late at night until he found some weirdo in a costume and tried to start an awkward conversation? Assuming he found one the heroes, what exactly were they going to do about their situation. He wasn’t sure they’d just believe he’d created them, or at least, their “template” or whatever. If they were aliens or robots copying his ideas, they wouldn’t probably listen to him anyway. If they were the actual characters, and he ended up running into one of his villains, then he could easily end up dead or crippled or turned into a zombie or mutated or something else horrible.

But he didn’t want that happening to anyone else, either. But he was in no position to stop things if it did. But…

Sal let out a frustrated yell and hurled his keys across the room, ignoring the mark they made on the cheaply painted white wall. Jesus Christ, what was wrong with him? Whatever the situation was, he had to act, and he had to act now! But like most major moments of decision in his life, he just ended up arguing himself into paralysis. He went to the tiny nook of a hallway that separated his room and bathroom, starting the first few steps of a frustrated pacing. As he passed his bedroom door, however, he noticed something odd. The spiky ball of crystal still sitting on his bedside table, where’d left it this morning.

But now, it was very softly glowing.

FIVE

Sal stared at the crystal for a full minute, his thoughts churning. The glow, softly shifting colors in a liquid swirl like the surface of a bubble, reminded him of the flash of light he’d seen before he’d been knocked out. The obvious clicked into place in his mind: the crystal had done this.

Ridiculous, he thought. Magical character creator devices didn’t just fall out of the sky.

Superhumans don’t exist, either, he argued with himself.

Why was it glowing now, for that matter? Did it recharge itself over time? Or perhaps… perhaps because Flara and Scorpion had been killed by the cops, their energy, or their essence, or whatever it was, had returned to the crystal. He wasn’t sure about the timing on that; the crystal hadn’t been glowing when he left for work, and the shoot-out had happened before then. But maybe it took time for the energy to return?

Sal’s brow furrowed and he shook his head. Speculating while just staring at it wasn’t going to get him anywhere. Hesitantly, he reached out to the crystal. As he touched it, he felt a vaguely warm, slightly tingling sensation. He turned it over in his hands. Just what the hell was it? How did it work? Frowning, he tried to see if there was some kind of mechanism, tugging and pushing on the spikes to see if anything gave or shifted. Nothing happened. He then held the crystal out, thought about a random character, one of his old comic strip characters from when he was a child, and said, “Sarah Boo, I choose you!”

He almost had a heart attack when the crystal pulsed, the energy faded, and a cartoon ghost popped into being right in front of him. He jerked back, half-falling out of the doorway to his bedroom, his back hitting the doorframe to his bathroom. Right before his eyes was a classical cartoon depiction of a ghost: a softly glowing humanoid white blob of a body with no feet, mitten-like hands, and a simple face made of a line for the mouth and two round black eyes. The figured turned towards him, blinking as she noticed him. The motion caused Sal to notice her long eyelashes, the only obvious physical signifier that the ghost was female.

“Oh! Um, hello there, sir!” said Sarah Boo. Sal just gawked at her. The ghost girl frowned, cocking her head to the side, putting her right hand on her “hip”, and rubbing the approximation of a chin with her left hand. “Are you okay, sir? Never seen a ghost before or something?”

“Uh… uh… or… something…?” said Sal. He wasn’t exactly intimidated by her. Sarah Boo was just a side character from a little newspaper-style comic strip that could be considered a “gag” comic only by a six-year-old’s standards. She could walk through walls and float, but had no outright dangerous powers, and her personality was as a one-note, bland nice girl.

“Okay!” she said, and smiled. Just like a pale smiley face. It was even sillier looking in fully three dimensional view. Sal had the impression of one of those movies where live actors interacted with cartoon characters, except there was something a bit more… he wasn’t sure how to describe it. Even though she was very obviously a cartoon character, there was a sort of tangible quality that movie special effects couldn’t quite replicate.

He stood up, composed himself, and held out his hand. “Sorry, rude of me,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.” Sarah Boo held out her hand and shook it. There was a sensation of shaking a silk bag stuffed with marshmallow fluff. “So,” he continued. “I don’t suppose you recognize me?”

Sarah frowned and rubbed her chin in thought. “Um, no? Have we met before?”

“Sorry, I must have you confused with someone else,” Sal said, shrugging.

“Ah, probably my brother Billy!” she said, smiling again. “People get us mixed up all the time!”

Sal recalled the only notable difference between Billy and Sarah was that Sarah had the eyelashes. He nodded sagely. “That makes sense.” He tried to think of something else to say. He should have prepared some questions before trying to summon another character. For now, though, he was just testing to see if he could. Now, how to undo it?

He cleared his throat. “Well, it’s been nice meeting you, but I’m afraid I have some work to get done, so, um, I’ll need you to head out.”

Sarah looked confused again. “Head out? Um, okay, but…” she looked around. “I don’t… know where I am… actually…” She turned slowly and inspected his sparsely furnished bedroom.

Sal held up the crystal and said, “Sarah Boo, return!”

She turned to him, looking even more confused. “What? Return where?”

He frowned and looked at the crystal. How the heck was this supposed to work? “Um… let’s see… Sarah, could you step back inside this crystal, please?”

“Back in? What?”

So she didn’t know she’d come from it? “Sorry, but what do you remember before you appeared here?”

“I don’t… I don’t know, I just… I guess I was in my room, reading or something…” The poor ghost girl’s face was a comical expression of confusion and she scratched her head. Sal figured she probably wasn’t the right character to ask such questions. She was just a one-note cartoon, after all, someone he’d drawn maybe two or three times.

“Alright, alright, sorry, never mind,” he said. He thought for a moment, then held out the crystal. “Could you do me a favor and hold this?”

“Oh, uh, sure.” She reached out to touch it. As soon as her mitten-like hand made contact with the crystal, she vanished, and the soft glow returned. Sal blinked, and almost dropped the thing.

Okay. Okay, so, apparently, there was something he could do about these characters popping up. If he could get them to touch the crystal, then he could reabsorb them. And if Sarah Boo was any indication, it seemed like they were probably—well, actually, he barely remembered anything about Sarah. She was never a developed character in the first place, so he doubted there was much “character” for her to be in. Okay, time to summon someone a bit more complicated, someone more developed, with a more analytical mind, yet also not supremely dangerous. He ran through the options, until he settled on a character. Going back into the living room, he sat down on the couch and held the crystal in front of him.

“Saint Calibur,” he said. He wasn’t sure if the words were necessary, but he’d roll with it for now.

The glow faded from the crystal, and suddenly, a tall woman with long brown hair appeared before him. She had a sort of simple cowgirl look, dark jeans, boots, a tan long coat and red neckerchief over a white shirt, topped with a cowboy hat. Twin revolvers were strapped to her hips, though the coat concealed them at the moment. He could tell mainly because of the gun belt.

Saint Calibur blinked and looked down at him. She took a step back, glanced around quickly, and then locked her gaze on him. Sal swallowed a little nervously. Saint Calibur, a gunslinger with healing powers, was a pretty level-headed character, but he still wasn’t sure what he was dealing with.

“Well,” she said. “I don’t suppose you have an explanation for this?”

“Possibly,” said Sal. “But that depends on what you know. Firstly, do you know who I am?”

Saint shook her head.

Sal nodded, expecting that. “Alright, I didn’t think so. Next question…”

“I should be asking you the questions,” she said. “Starting with who are you, and how did I get here?”

Sal gave her a thin smile. “I know, I’m sorry, but, I’m just as confused as you. Can you tell me the last thing you remember before you showed up here?”

“You could at least give me your name first.”

He didn’t the harm in that. “Salvador Roberts.”

“Alright, Salvador, now, why did you think I should recognize you?”

He paused. “Just curious.”

Saint Calibur crossed her arms. “Odd thing to be curious about.”

Sal held back a sigh. She was a no-nonsense type character, that’s why he’d summoned her. But he was always terrible at confronting people, and he was already getting intimidated at the thought of questioning her. He should have summoned another cartoon character. Or, again, he should have just prepared questions ahead of time. Too late now.

Saint noted his hesitation and could tell he was struggling with what to say. She held up a hand in an acquiescing gesture. “Alright, I apologize. Ask your questions, we can figure this out together.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I’m sorry. I am responsible for you being here, thanks to this crystal.” He held up the spiky mass and Saint appraised it with a glance, without getting closer. “I don’t know what it is, or how it allowed me to summon you. I’d like to know the last thing you remember before appearing here.”

“I was in my office,” she said. “Routine paperwork.”

Sal remembered she was a bounty hunter as well as a monster hunter. Probably going over case files. So, like Sarah, she’d been summoned from a moment of relative calm and mundanity. He wasn’t sure if that was actually relevant. Where exactly did his characters go, what did they do, on a day to day basis, when he wasn’t running them through adventures and challenges? That was always his problem with characters; he had a general sense of their personality, knew their backstories, even in a few cases had a good sense of their relationships, but he never really dug past that. He never really examined his characters beyond their obvious details. It occurred to him, for example, that he had no clue what Saint Calibur did in her downtime.

“What’s the last major event in your life?” he said. “Have you—” Sal stopped himself before he asked her something as blatant as “did you go through this harrowing storyline yet?” He turned the words over in his head. “I guess, what’s the last case you finished?”

Saint Calibur frowned and gave him a studious look for a moment. “I dealt with a murderer who had managed to escape during a prison transfer.”

Okay, that would be one of the hundreds of little day job cases she’d done over the years, the sorts of things Sal would mention in passing in a story. Exciting by most people’s standard’s, but not anything your typical cop couldn’t handle.

“Let me rephrase: what’s the last major case you dealt with? Particularly in regards to the supernatural?”

Saint Calibur narrowed her eyes a bit and said slowly, “Zombie outbreak in Tuscan. The Necromaster.”

Okay, that was better. Saint Calibur was what Sal called one of his “floater” characters, one he’d tried to use for several different projects that all fell through. Over the course his brainstorming, he’d more or less come up with a hodge-podge canon of her most consistent adventures which he counted as her personal “continuity,” even if it didn’t always click with a given project he tried to fit her in. At the same time, he never had a distinct “ending” story for her, so there was no telling how long her adventures would theoretically continue.

The Necromaster case was later in her timeline, at least, probably the most “current” of the stories as he usually ordered them, meaning she was currently at her most “up to date” moment of her character. That was good.

“Okay,” he said. “Now, one more thing, and I know this will be an odd request, but I would like to test something.” He set the crystal down and stood, wincing a bit as his bad knee twinged. There was another reason he’d chosen Saint Calibur, a skilled gunslinger, but also a character imbued with healing magic. “I would like to see if you can heal me.”

Saint gave him a cool look, her arms still crossed. “Do you have an injury?”

“Just normal wear and tear,” he said. “But it’s added up over the years. Bad joints. Sour stomach. I would like to see a demonstration of your healing ability, to confirm something.”

Saint glanced him over, and said, “I’m not a doctor, and you probably don’t want to hear this, but I would advise you to lose weight.” She glanced around. His apartment wasn’t a total mess, but it was clear he hadn’t cleaned up in a while. She looked back to him. “If you have a genetic condition, that’s one thing, but I’m doubting that’s the case here. I don’t mean to offend, but you don’t seem the type to take very good care of yourself.”

Sal winced a bit. Of course, he knew that, but he didn’t need his own creations lecturing him. “So…”

Saint offered him her hand. “I’m just saying. I don’t mind patching you up a bit, but if you don’t actually put in the effort of self-care, you’ll be right back to where you are.”

“I know,” said Sal and he took her hand as if to shake it. “What’s going on right now is bigger than my health, though. Please, just do this one thing, I’ll answer any questions afterwards.”

Saint nodded, and then her hand began to glow. The white light extended from her hand to coat Sal’s whole body like an aura. He sucked in a small breath as he felt a warm, soft sensation, like his whole body was being wrapped in a warm blanket. Then, he felt little twinges in his joints, felt a tickle in his stomach, felt the muscles of his torso and limbs tighten a bit. He felt a heady rush for a moment, and then, his senses cleared and came into sharp focus.

Then, the light faded and she let go of his hand. Sal almost gasped as he stood tall. He felt different, more energized, less stiff. He looked himself over. His shorts and shirt felt a bit looser. She hadn’t made him thin, but his gut had noticeably shrank by at least a couple inches. He lifted his shirt and ran a hand over his stomach. The stretch marks were all gone. He tested his body, doing a couple squats and stretches. No stiffness in his joints, no twinges of pain from his bad knee, no sharp soreness from his tendonitis, even when he bent his wrists and ankles at awkward angles to trigger a flare up. He took a deep breath, and he swore he could suck in more air than before. He didn’t even feel any back pain.

It was a miracle. He was still overweight, but otherwise, he felt like she’d reset his body back to when he was in his early 20s, before he’d started to build up the little hitches and day-to-day wear that had slowed him down over the past fifteen years. He wondered if even his hemorrhoids had cleared up.

He looked at her in stark relief and disbelief. He’d fantasized, as he was sure most adults did, of medical science making a magic pill that could instantly restore your youth, but to actually experience it! His head swam with the possibilities.

“All better?” she said, snapping him out of his daze.

“Y-yeah, thank you! Really, thank you.”

She gave him a slight smile. “You’re welcome.”

“Okay,” Sal said, not letting himself get too distracted. “Okay, what would you like to know?”

“Personally, I would like to go home,” she said. “I’m willing to forget this whole encounter. And since I just gave you a health boost, I’d wager the fair thing to do would be to allow me that much.”

“Oh,” he said. “Um, yeah, that makes sense.” He was still holding the crystal. “Okay, well, I think how this works is, just put your hand on this.”

“That’s all?” she said.

“Yes.” He held the crystal out. “I’m sorry to pull you away.”

Saint Calibur hesitated, then held a hand out, hovering the fingers over the device. She looked him in the eye and frowned. “You have no idea what you’re doing with this thing, do you?”

“I’m figuring it out,” he said.

She thought for a moment, pulling her hand back a few inches. Then she shook her head. “Not my place to lecture you. I don’t know what’s going on. But for your sake, and the sake of the people around you, be careful.”

Sal nodded, cowed a bit by her intense gaze. Then she touched the crystal and vanished. He stepped back and dropped heavily onto his couch, staring at the mysterious object still clutched in his hand. Good lord. If he really could just summon any character he’d created, then the possibilities were endless. He’d made thousands of characters and hundreds of worlds. Maybe only a handful were worth actually writing about, but it still meant that with this strange device, he had an all but limitless number of super powers at his beck and call. In his hand, he held the potential to become a god.

Before that thought could fully sink in, however, his apartment was rocked by the shockwave of an explosion. He let out a cry and dropped to the ground as his windows exploded. A thunderous, bestial roar could be heard, rattling the building like intense thunder. Sal quickly scrambled away from the wall into the dining area. The crystal had flown from his hand and rolled into the corner. Wincing in new pain, he snatched it up desperately. He turned and could see through the shattered windows a huge, lumbering figure, a building-sized mass of muscle, roughly man-shaped, but with three huge eyestalks instead of a head, a tremendous toothy maw in the middle of its chest. The creature was smashing its way across the apartment parking lot.

Sal froze up, gripped in terror, eyes wide as he saw one of his early monster characters casually walk through a whole building, chomping and smashing its way through, gobbling up whatever managed to fall towards its giant mouth. Screams of panic, terror, and pain radiated from the new ruined building.

Jesus Christ. The Tri-Clops. A monster so powerful it took a whole team of his superheroes to beat. Where the fuck had that thing been when people were taking pictures? Had some of his loose characters shifted forms? Did the crystal summon and de-summon things on its own? Had he summoned other characters subconsciously while holding it?

He somehow managed to force himself into motion, grabbing his keys off the floor and running out of the building. He didn’t even bother going for his car, as it was close to where the Tri-Clops was rampaging. He joined the mass of people fleeing from the scene of destruction, the crystal clutched tightly in his hands, scrambling to think of who he could summon that could match the monster with a minimum amount of damage.

The power of a god? What good was that, when he couldn’t even control his own creations?

SIX

As Sal scrambled to think of who he could summon, three human-sized bolts of color shot through the night sky overhead, as did a fourth who blurred by on the ground. Two of the skybound figures unleashed brilliant beams of energy at the Tri-Clops, causing the creature to stagger back with a deafening roar. A moment later, the third flying figure and the one of the ground slammed into the creature, crushing its three-story body into the ground, grinding it into the wreckage of the building it had already smashed. From this angle, Sal lost sight of them briefly as his own building blocked the view.

There were screams and gasps all around him. Dozens of people were now lining the end of the complex’s parking lot, looking in alternating expressions of horror, amazement, confusion, and shock as a comic book superhero battle began right in front of them.

Various curses, exclamations, and cries sounded around him, and Sal found himself swept up in the tide of people as another shockwave knocked them all off their feet. Sal kept his eyes focus on the fight as best he could, and saw a red-white-and-blue streak soar off into the sky. It was the American Soldier. A Superman knock-off with a patriotic theme. Superhuman strength, durability, speed, flight. Maybe laser vision, Sal couldn’t quite remember if he’d settled on that or not.

The Tri-Clops surged into view around the corner of his building for a moment, before it shrank back, peppered with blinding flashes of lightning, fire, and blue laser beams forcing him down. The Tri-Clop’s roared again, so loud, it shattered every still-intact pane of glass left in the compound and even the houses in the neighboring street. The people in the crowd, Sal included, screamed and several fell unconscious. Some were bleeding out of their ears. Sal’s head rung dizzyingly, and he stumbled clumsily to his feet, his vision blurring.

He managed to look up just in time to see the Tri-Clops flatten his apartment building like it was made of Styrofoam. Bricks, chunks of wood, shard of metal, exploded from the collapsing structure, a salvo of cannon-ball sized shrapnel aiming right for them. Sal didn’t even have time to brace himself as a piece of concrete the size of his head came right at his face—

—and then, there was a wooshing sound, the feeling of wind lashing him so hard his skin felt the friction burn, and he was suddenly standing in the empty lot a couple blocks away. A moment later, his stomach caught up with him, and the nausea and sharp ache of extreme whiplash knocked him back on his ass. He flipped over in time to vomit. He wasn’t the only one either, as more people appeared on the lot, blinking into existence while a dark blur zipped back and forth down the street. Most of them fell over, vomited, or curled into balls of pain.

Sal took several precious to breathe and collect his thoughts. Too fast. Everything was happening too fast. He looked to his hand, where he still clutched the crystal, so hard blood was seeping down his fingers.

He forced himself to his feet, grunting and gritting his teeth, new aches and pains worse than those he’d before Saint Calibur had healed him. Finally, the dark blur paused, having collected everybody from the sidelines of the battle. Sal realized his hearing was dulled, damage from the glass-shattering roar no doubt. Even so, the ground trembled, and the thunder and flash of the battle could be seen, even from this distance.

The dark blur of a figure had finally stopped, looking over his handiwork. Sal recognized Max-Out. Super strength, super speed, super durability, able to increase the level of one of those powers by temporarily sacrificing one or both of the others.

“Everybody just stay here!” Max said, holding his hands out to the crowd. “Help is on the way, but we need to defeat that monster!”

“MAX!” yelled Sal, startling the people around him. He pushed and hopped his way through the crowd to reach the man.

Max-Out had already started running, gaining a hundred feet in half a second, but he stopped just as quick and skipped back. “Yeah? Who called me?”

“I did!” said Sal, breathlessly forcing himself to go up to the man.

“Who are you?”

“Max, listen to me, there’s no time. You have to race me over to that monster.”

Max-Out, taller than Sal by a full head, looking down at him with a skeptical look. “You, sir, are barely on your feet. Sit down and wait for the medics.”

“No!” he held up the spiky crystal. “Please! Use your super speed to zip me over there, so I can press this against the monster’s body. Doesn’t matter where, just get me right up to him, shove my hand if you need to. Just don’t touch the crystal yourself, or—”

Max glanced at the object. “Sir, please, some dollar store paper weight isn’t—”

“HEAD’S UP!” yelled one of the people in the crowd. People screamed and scrambled away as a truck came sailing through the air. It overshot the lot and went right towards the next building, a small grocery store. Thankfully, given the time of night, the store was closed, but there were still some cars parked as the last of the staff cleaned up for the night. Or would be cleaning up, if they weren’t all gathering in their own lot to see what the commotion was about. The truck was heading right for them!

Max-Out, however, had it handled. Before Sal could even say something, he’d disappeared in a blur, leaped up, and punched the vehicle down into the narrow stretch of grass between the empty lot and the grocer’s parking lot, before it could slam into the other bystanders or their building.

Max then reappeared in front of Sal. “Alright, what were you saying?”

More flashes of light and thunderous explosions could be heard. Given the brief glimpses of the costumes, and the powers being displayed, Sal had to guess that aside from American Soldier, Captain Powerfist, an energy-weilding hero, and Spellcaster, an elemental sorceress, had been the other two fliers to answer the call to action. Along with Max, they might be enough to handle the Tri-Clops, but how much more damage was going to be done in the process? Beings on their level could fight for hours, for days. The whole town could be leveled before a victor emerged.

“Max, listen, please,” Sal said, grabbing the man’s arm.

Max pushed his hand away. “Listen, if you think it’ll help, I’ll take the crystal,” he said, and reached out for it.

“NO!” said Sal, yanking it back. “Goddamn it, I don’t have time to explain, but it’ll only work if I’m holding it! You have to run me right up to Tri-Clops, and—”

“Tri-Clops?” said Max, confused for a second. Then he glanced back to the fight. “Oh. The monster.” He pointed at his face with three fingers splayed in a triangle and nodded. “Cuz of the three eyes. Got it.”

“Right, yeah, that’s right.” Sal had almost forgotten Max was part of a different hero universe from the other three. Whatever. There wasn’t time for this. “Max, I’m begging you,” he said. “I’ll explain everything, just please, it’s the fastest way to stop that thing.”

Max glanced the man over, looked back to where the fight was happening, then cursed and reached for him. A moment later, the rush of harsh wind followed, and Sal found himself with his hand, holding the crystal, shoved up against a meaty slab of incredibly tough flesh. There was a pause, then the nauseating pain of whiplash struck him once more, and he let out a shout, almost curling into a ball. Max kept his hand pressed into the Tri-Clop’s leg.

The was a rumbling sound as the Tri-Clops looked down and started to shift its weight to kick the duo away. But then, it vanished. In the sky above, half-hidden in the smoke and dust kicked up from the battle, the three other superheroes were poised as if about to make another attack.

Sal tied to catch his breath, only to choke on the dust. Max pulled him away, racing him away from the complex, this time at a much more reasonable speed, no worse than a car on a main road. Nonetheless, gasping for air, in pain, and dizzy, Sal passed out, still clutching the crystal in a death grip.

SEVEN

Sal awoke to a feeling of tingling warmth, not unlike what he’d felt from Saint’s spell. This time, however, he opened his eyes to see another woman leaning over him, her hand on his chest, glowing with soft green light. The dark pixie-cut hair and green and navy body suit immediately identified her as Spellcaster.

“Feeling better?” she said, standing tall and letting him sit up. Sal realized he was lying on a bed in a hotel room, two queen beds with a table between them. The wall-mounted lamps were on, and though the blinds and curtains were closed, the lack of light streaming through the seams indicated it was still night.

Sal was on the bed farther from the door and turned to face the others. All four of the heroes were facing him. Spellcaster stood next to him, Max-Out sitting on the other bed. Captain Powerfist sat in a chair next to the window with his arms folded, while American Soldier leaned back against the door.

“You okay?” said the Soldier.

“Yeah,” said Sal. “Much… much better.” He looked to Spellcaster and nodded appreciatively. “Thank you.”

She smiled softly. “Sure thing.”

“So, let’s get down to it,” said the Captain. Despite how silly his costume looked, the serious and confident posture and expression did not inspire any mirth in Sal, even had the situation not been so shock-inducing. The same could be said for the Soldier.

“Who are you, what is that crystal, is it connected to us being here, and what exactly did it do to defeat the Tri-Clops?”

Sal felt himself clam up. He’d just been through several world-redefining events in a row and almost gotten killed. And now, he was suddenly in a room with four of his own superhero characters looking at him like he was a threat.

Spellcaster reached over and put a calming hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay, sir, take a moment if you need to.”

“We need answers,” said the Captain.

“You can get them in a minute,” said Spellcaster.

“Shell shocked, I wager,” said the Soldier. “In the brief time we’ve been here, it’s clear the people of this world aren’t used to people like us.”

Sal felt a sudden lurch of panic. “The people at the apartment,” he said. He looked at them with dread. “You didn’t just leave them all there like that, did you?”

“Like what?” said Max.

“All beat up and bleeding on the ground? With all their homes destroyed?”

The four exchanged a glance. Spellcaster said, “I cast a general healing spell to get everyone back on their feet and stabilized. I considered casting a memory spell to make everyone think a gas main had exploded, but I realized we were being recorded anyway, and we thought it better to vacate the area than waste any more time.”

“We’re actually in the next town over,” said Max. “Kingdom City, I think?”

“Okay,” said Sal. He sat there, looking at the floor, thinking. His eyes widened as he realized he wasn’t holding the crystal. He jumped and looked about in a sudden panic.“Where—?”

Max opened the side table drawer. Next to a notepad and pen, the spiky crystal was there, now glowing brighter than before. “We made you drop it when we got in here. Given how the Tri-Clops vanished, we figured we shouldn’t touch it.”

“Yeah,” said Sal, letting out a sigh of relief. “Smart.” He looked back to the floor. “I… I don’t suppose you…”

“What?” said Max.

“People died,” said Sal.

The Soldier nodded. “We came as soon as we could, tried to keep the Tri-Clops pinned the spot he’d already destroyed. I tried to remove him, carry him away, but he knocked me into orbit. By the time I got back, Max had already gotten you to him.”

Sal sat in silence for a moment. “Is there anyone else? Were there any other fights?”

“A couple skirmishes on the edge of town,” said the Soldier. “We handled it.”

“I saw Corpse-Eater,” said Sal.

“I got the drop on him before he could do anything,” said Spellcaster. “Cast a banishing spell. It seemed to… I’m not sure. It didn’t discorporate him and send him back to Hell like it should have. He seemed to just vaporize. Right on time, too, he was already starting to exhume some bodies.”

Sal said nothing, his thoughts slowly churning. He’d killed people. It didn’t matter that it hadn’t been intentional, that the space rock had somehow yanked characters out of his head and set them loose on the world without his knowing. They were still his creations. He did this. Before, his creations just drove him crazy with his inability to write them. Now, they’d gotten people killed.

They’d also saved people, true, but they wouldn’t have needed saving if—

Sal jumped as Spellcaster put a hand on his shoulder. “Hey. It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay,” said the Captain. He gave Sal a hard look. “We need to know what caused this. What brought us here and how we can bring everyone back.” He nodded towards the table. “The crystal, I assume. It’s a gateway between our worlds?”

Sal swallowed hard and looked at all of them, then back at the ground. “Not exactly. I, uh…” he let out a breath. “I’m your creator. I’m an… I was going to say author, but I’ve barely written anything, and never been published. I’ve just posted a few shitty stories on the internet, drew a few crappy comics as a kid.” He tapped the side of his head. “You’re all figments of my imagination. And the crystal…”

He reached into the drawer and pulled it back out. The four looked at it warily. “The crystal, I just discovered, allows me to summon you into my world.”

Sal could almost feel Captain Powerfist’s glare as the muscular energy caster uncrossed his arms and leaned forward. Max also gave him a hard look, while the Soldier and Spellcaster’s expressions remained calm, but stern. Sal flinched from their gazes.

The Captain broke the harsh silence first. “You summoned the Tri-Clops into your world? A creature that could crack this whole continent into pieces?”

Sal felt his breath catch as he stared at the crystal. “Just listen. I had no idea, okay? I was walking down the street yesterday, and this thing, whatever the fuck this is, it fell out of the sky and struck me. It was glowing brightly then. Next thing I know, I wake up back in my bed and this thing is in my hand, and it isn’t glowing, it just looks like some cheap novelty item. I thought maybe I’d had a seizure or something, picked this up when I stumbled back home somehow. I had no idea what it was or what it did.”

Sal looked up at them. “I went to work. I had no idea. I went to work, and didn’t find out until my shift started that some of you had showed up in my world. You have to understand, this stuff doesn’t happen here. We don’t superhumans or magic or aliens or living robots or monsters or psychics or… or… or anything else! So when a couple nutjobs in Halloween costumes break into a bank and they happen to look like some old doodles of mine, I think I’m the one going crazy.”

He took a shaky breath. “I didn’t even realize it was the crystal under I got home last night. Pure guess work. By then, I realized more of you had showed up. I was going to try to find one of you, I swear, but I didn’t know how and then that fucking monster appeared and…” He took another breath.

“Oh, fuck,” he said. “Do you have any idea how lucky I am you guys were here, too? That the crystal mostly summoned old Power Universe characters, and not the really evil cosmic psychos of my later works? I mean, as far as I know, it did summon those maniacs, too, and our whole planet is about to get sucked into a living dimension of darkness or cast into hell or folded into a time warp.”

Sal shook, the weight of it all pressing on him like a vice. “I don’t know how to stop it. I don’t know how to reverse it. I can suck you guys back into the crystal if you touch it, but how many of you are there? How many will comply? You managed to get Corpse-Eater, the cops killed Flara and Scorpion, but how many other villains are out there, waiting for their moment?” He shook his head. “And even among the heroes, how many might not accept the idea of going back, once they find out what they are?”

The four heroes shared a glance. American Soldier stood up from his lean against the door. “Spellcaster, Captain, lets talk outside for a moment. Max, keep an eye on him.”

Max grunted. “Sure. Fine. Not from your world, guess you can’t trust me, either.” He looked back at the Soldier. “That means you’re also not my boss.”

The Soldier frowned. “You misjudge me, Max. With your speed, you can catch him easily if he tries anything. You don’t have to prove yourself to us; without your help, we’d still be fighting the Tri-Clops.”

“Fair enough.” Max turned back to face Sal, leaning back on his bed. The other three left, leaving to two men to sit in silence for a few minutes. Sal just stared at the crystal, doing his best not to panic.

Finally, Max broke the silence. “So, you created us, huh?”

“Yeah,” said Sal.

“Not sure how much I believe that,” he said. “Prove it.”

“Your name is Maxwell Auwitts. You're the leader of Cavalry, you used to be the right-hand man of a gang leader named the Snake, your team protects the city of Blue Haven, which is located in a magically terraformed Antarctica.”

Max nodded. “Accurate. But still doesn’t prove anything. You say your world doesn’t have superhumans, but you could still be a telepath. Or the crystal lets you gain information somehow.”

“You’re not freaked out about being somebody’s creation?” said Sal.

Max shrugged. Of course he did. Sal remembered that one nearly universal quality of most of his heroes was their ability to just roll with the punches and not really by fazed by earth-shattering revelations. Either they were too seasoned and worldly, or they were just that bland in personality. Usually both. No wonder his characters just came off as dull robots when he tried to write them naturally, and boring cliché stock tropes when he tried to force some personality.

The other three came back inside. “Alright,” said the American Soldier. “We’ve talked it over, and we’re willing to believe your story.”

“Just like that?” said Sal.

The Captain cut in. “It isn’t the weirdest situation we’ve been through.”

“You’re all, uh, willing to just dissolve yourselves back into the crystal?”

The American Soldier nodded. “And take whoever we need to back with us as well. If the crystal is merely a doorway that sent us here, then we all need to go back. If we are, in fact, just constructs based on your story creations, then we don’t belong in this world, and the right thing would be to undo our presence here.”

“We just need to make sure we can catch everybody,” said Spellcaster. “I can use some divination spells to track others like us, but we may need some extra help. Is there anyone you can summon who could lend some assistance?”

Sal thought it over. A wide-range psychic would be best. He knew just the character. He held the crystal out and said, “Brain.”

In an instant, he was there. His body was dressed in a white outfit with pink gloves, boots, and trunks, a rather typical and bland hero costume. His most outstanding feature, however, was his head. Instead of a normal human head, a large pink brain sat atop his neck, a long spinal cord trailing from the back like a ponytail, The head was made all the stranger looking with a human face imbedded on the frontal lobes. It was one of the stranger, and yet still less original, hero characters Sal had created. But there were very few other psychic characters as powerful as he.

EIGHT

The Brain looked around, confused. “Um… okay… this is unexpected,” he said. He perked up, however, when he recognized the Soldier, the Captain, and Spellcaster. “Ah, hello. Have we been summoned for some great crisis again?”

“Of a sort,” said Spellcaster. She motioned to her head. “Read away.”

The Brain was a telepath and mind manipulator of great power. Capable of mind controlling an entire major metropolis full of people at once, of reaching telepathic probes clear to the other side of the planet, there was no better pick to cast a wide searching net to find any other of Sal’s stray characters. And force them to comply, if necessary. Despite a good number of his characters having resistance to psychic abilities through various methods, the Brain would be one the very few who could break through most of them.

Sal wondered at what point any of his concepts had actually not been utterly ridiculous kids’ comics tripe. Maybe nowadays he was more inspired by anime and video games than comics, but in the end, he hadn’t actually changed his focus very much. Even many of his newer characters were just walking powersets, with barely more depth of character than these old cartoon heroes of his. So stupid.

Stupid or not, though, lives were at stake. He had to end this as soon as he could, using whatever characters were best suited to the task. Truthfully, the simple directness of his characters was probably a benefit in this situation. It made dealing with them easier than dealing with actual people. It struck him that he hadn’t interacted with anybody who wasn’t a character of his since he’d gotten home from work. He’d been spending all this time talking to figments of his imagination. Even if they were really, physically here, this was surely still some sign of madness, right?

Sal felt the panic well up inside him as he realized this wouldn’t be the end of it. He’d still have to figure out what to do with the crystal once all his stray characters were reigned back in. He could use it to undo the damage done so far. He had characters who could rebuild the damaged property. Characters who could bring back the dead. Assuming the effects of their powers didn’t leave when he de-summoned them, and given his body still seemed to retain the overall healing Saint Calibur had done, that seemed to be the case, there was no telling the miracles he could work with this thing.

Shit, once everything was finished, he had characters that could provide him with nearly infinite wealth. Build a super-tech fortress on the Moon and go live there, summoning healers to keep him young and healthy, hell, he could summon other characters to give him super powers of his own! Assuming the crystal itself didn’t break or lose power, he could theoretically make himself immortal, with access to infinite resources.

Then he could—Jesus. The things he could do for the world. Uplift the human race in technology, spread magic and psychic powers. He’d have to be careful to ensure no one could usurp him, of course. Even if he wanted to remain hands-off with Earth, he wouldn’t want to risk someone stealing his own power, killing him, or leaving him to rot forever in some superhuman prison. But then, he wouldn’t let it get that far. Would he? He’d always thought he’d be easily corrupted by power. If he did make himself into a magical superman with alien tech and weird magic and armies of monsters at his beck and call, would he end up playing with the human race like a kid playing with ants?

Oh, god. He couldn’t think about this right now. One thing at a time. Fix the current crisis, then figure it out from there. He snapped out of his daze to see Max watching him closely, his expression stern, but cautious. Sal looked over to see Spellcaster and the Brain were now holding hands, eyes closed in concentration. Spellcaster was glowing softly with a green nimbus of light, with the Brain’s head rippled with deep purple energy. The American Solider and Captain Powerfist had left the room and were standing outside.

“I'm, uh, going to use the bathroom,” said Sal, stepping around the sorceress and the psychic.

“Don't fall in,” said Max. Sal blinked, and Max gave him a smirk. Sal let out a grunt of a laugh, and shook his head. That had been one of his own commonly overused sarcastic jokes. Hearing a tough guy like Max use it was enough to break some of Sal's anxious tension, if only by a little bit.

He did his business, then splashed some water on his face to try and calm his nerves more. It was going to be okay, he told himself. The heroes would fix everything. It's what they did. If this didn't work, they would regroup and figure out a new plan. He took another breath, and rejoined the others, just as Brain and Spellcaster came out of their trance.

Brain called out, and the Soldier and the Captain rejoined the group. “Found everyone,” the psychic hero said. “Most of them appear to be heroes, but a couple villains are holed up in places, as well as a few, um, civilians? Everyone is still within the town limits of Fulton. Not sure if we’re limited to a certain distance from the crystal, but everyone’s still within fifteen miles of us.”

“Can you give me a run down of who they are?” said Sal. “And are you sure you found everyone?”

Spellcaster nodded. “There is a very, very faint thread of ethereal energy connecting all of us to the crystal. My divination spell has traced them all, and the Brain has confirmed them, as well as triple checked the surface thoughts of everyone for a hundred miles.”

“How many?”

“Thirty-nine others,” the Brain said. “Fortunately, I believe our combined strength and variety of talents are more than enough to corral any resisters.”

Sal nodded. “Okay. Thirty-nine. Not bad. You guys are some of the strongest characters I’ve made for your world—” He glanced to Max. “—worlds—”

Max made a dismissive wave. “Pffft. I’m barely mid-tier.”

“You’re also the only one here with real super speed,” said Sal. “You’re probably going to be the most critical. We can do that same trick we tried with Tri-Clops.” He turned to the Brain. “That said…”

The super-psychic nodded and suddenly, like a hologram, translucent images representing multiple figures flickered into view in the air between the assembled group. Sal let out a breath of relief. Most of them were Power Universe heroes and small-time villains, the sort of street-level superhumans that could be reasonably defeated by a well equipped police force. Several were from his urban fantasy world of the Wyld Hunt, more developed personalities than the old Power Universe superhero characters, but no where near the destructive levels anyone in this room could bring. This was going to be easy.

No, Sal thought. Don’t say that. Don’t fucking jinx it at this stage.

“So, what’s the easiest way to do this?” said the Brain. “We only have the one crystal, and only one person to carry it. I could just guide Max to carry Sal here to each of them at super speed. I can inform them of your approach for those who are agreeable, and you could take the rest by surprise.”

Sal remembered how well he’d faired, being forced along at super speed. “Um… is there something less potentially injuring to me? I don’t have the sort of super powers you guys do.”

“I can grant you a spell to toughen you up,” said Spellcaster.

American Soldier cut in, “Actually, can you still make portals?”

Spellcaster nodded. “All my other spells work so far.”

“Why not just have Brain call as many as he can to come here through your portals?”

“Huh. So simple, I can’t believe that wasn’t my first thought,” said Spellcaster.

“Nor mine, actually,” said the Brain.

Sal cracked a small smile. “That’s okay, I sometimes forget what powers you all have, too.” It was true, though. He’d thought Spellcaster was mainly just a “fireballs and lightning bolts” type wizard, he’d forgotten she was basically a whole swiss army knife of useful spells. He could only assume she hadn’t just portaled Tri-Clops away because he’d been too fast to get a bead on. He hoped it wasn’t because, when he’d created her as a child, such a tactic was just boring, so he’d subconsciously made it a quirk of her character to not think of such solutions in a critical moment. It was amazing how quickly the fights or problems in comic books could be resolved if the hero just used one of their powers the smart way right at the start of the story. But then, that’s why comics were for kids and adults with a suspension of disbelief, and not overly nitpicky critics.

The others cocked an eyebrow at him, not entirely sure how to take his statement, as if his faulty memory of their abilities might somehow effect their own abilities. But time was wasting, so they shrugged it off. The room was already getting crowded with people, so everyone backed up to the walls, while Sal stood between the beds, holding the spiky crystal up. The Brain and Spellcaster concentrated, and a swirling portal of white light, shot through with golden streaks, opened before them, taking a few seconds to widen properly. So, it did take more time than was combat efficient. Sal wasn’t sure if that was reassuring or not.

The process went smoother and simpler than he’d expected. He figured there’d be arguments. He thought some of the characters might suddenly attack him for whatever hellish events he’d written them into previously. Maybe some debates. Definitely bewilderment. Some kind of resistence. But apparently, the Brain had everything explained by the time the various characters stepped through Spellcaster’s portal. They said nothing, other than to spare him or the other heroes a glance, before touching the crystal. One by one, they disappeared, a few seconds passing between each as Spellcaster had to re-adjust the coordinates. Sal kept count. After ten minutes of gathering, thirty-six characters stepped through and touched the crystal, no one saying a word. By now, Sal was used to seeing his old character designs translated into living three-dimensional form. He blanched at how bland and generic most of them were. Most weren’t any better than the Brain’s outfit, a solid color body suit with a different shade of gloves, boots, and belt. Some were just one color with a simple logo. Others were just generic creature or robot or armor designs, like a humanoid lizard or a man in a knight’s suit with some blades coming off the shoulders.

With every single one, the crystal glowed brighter and brighter, and started getting warmer. An almost electric buzzing started in his hand, and he had to set the device on the floor to keep it from burning him. By this point, thirty characters had already touched it, and another was coming out, a kid in a blue bard’s outfit. He looked up at Sal a bit confused. Sal just shrugged and pointed at it. Thankfully, when the kid touched it, he disappeared anyway. Well, that was convenient.

After character thirty-six, though, they stopped coming. Spellcaster let the portal drop and the Brain frowned. “We have some stragglers,” he said.

“Who is it?” the Captain said with a scowl.

“Let’s see… Jackie’s Lantern, Lithe, and Mysteriok. I know of Lithe and Mysteriok, but I’ve not heard of Jackie.”

“I know her,” said Max. “I also know Lithe, though.” They all looked to Sal.

He shrugged. “Sometimes I reuse characters for different projects. I’ve got too many of you banging around in my head as it is.”

“Fair enough,” said Max. “So where are they? Let’s get the drop on them and go.”

“Can you just force them to come?” said the Captain.

The Brain frowned. “I am loathe to control people without it being absolutely necessary.”

“This is pretty damn necessary, Brain,” the Captain shot back. “Mysteriok conquered a whole city and killed a whole team of heroes. If he can pull that off, this world can’t handle him. We don’t have time for kid gloves.”

“I thought he was killed by the Animal?” said American Soldier.

“There’s no telling where in the timeline any of us are from,” said Powerfist.

“I would assume after your latest adventure, but not after you’ve died,” said Sal. “So, if it’s Mysteriok, this is him at the height of his power. Which, to be fair, isn’t as high as any of you, but…”

“If you’re our creator, then you know power level does not necessarily guarantee threat level,” said the Soldier.

“Of course,” said Sal, frowning. He knew that. But still, the Reign of Mysteriok storyline, where he’d conquered the home city of his nemesis, the Amazing Animal, the heroes he’d defeated and killed were mostly on the lower end, “street-level” characters the likes of which Spider-Man or maybe even Batman could have handled. The people in this room were all high-tier level characters, even Max when he used his powers at peak efficiency. He wasn’t sure how Mysteriok could be a real threat to all of them combined.

Of course, that was the problem with writing super genius characters like a crazy Dr. Doom rip-off. Was Mysteriok actually smart enough to outthink everyone in this room, or would reality set in, and he’d be just as dumb as Sal himself?

They couldn’t risk finding out. “Seize his mind,” said Sal. “Force him here.”

“I just tried,” said the Brain, frowning.

Sal blinked. “You did?”

“The Captain was right about this being a necessary situation, so I’ve been trying. I can’t seem to get a lock on his thoughts. He’s using some kind of device, I would assume.”

“That’s crazy. You’re so powerful, you can breach psychic shields no one else can.”

“Well, not this one, apparently.”

“Maybe the crystal does have its limits,” said the Solider. “We haven’t really had the opportunity to fully test our powers here, but the Tri-Clops should have been able to do much more damage than he did. The last time he appeared on our world, he shattered a whole city with one punch. He didn’t display that kind of strength in the fight.”

“We can’t give Mysteriok any more time to establish a base of power,” said the Captain. “You still know where he is?” The Brain nodded. “Then we go. Now. Bullrush him, hit him so fast he won’t have time to raise his fist to point at us, much less give us a villain monologue.”

The others looked to the American Soldier, who nodded. Spellcaster whipped up another portal. The Soldier put a hand out to stop Sal from coming through, even as his creator used a pillow to grab the now hotly glowing crystal. “We’re not sure how the crystal will react with the portal, so we’ll jump through and tackle him. You and Max race over to join us. If we do get ambushed, you can still make a surprise move.”

Max scowled as the four Power Universe heroes jumped into the portal, and it vanished. “Figures,” he said.

“Well, it’s not a bad idea,” said Sal. Max grabbed him. “Uh, please go a little slower than before.”

“Yeah, sorry,” said Max. “I’ll try to keep it at race car speed. Except the Brain’s telepathic signal just cut out already.”

“Fuck!” said Sal. “Do you know where to go?”

“I still got the directions, so yes,” he said. “Now brace yourself.”

And with a rush of wind, they were gone.

NINE

The two appeared back in Fulton, at the edge of a warehouse. The place was cordoned off by police, and a large crowd of people was gathered around the edges of the property. The building sported a massive hole in the roof, billowing with smoke. The sun was just peaking up over the horizon, suffusing the building and smoke with an ember-like glow. Max didn’t give them any time to admire the view, however, as he raced Sal around the crowd and zipped through the normally secured entrance by slamming through it, turning his back and protecting Sal with his body even as he cannonballed through the doors. He turned back around, and Sal briefly got a glimpse of a huge open area with row upon row of multi-tiered pallet storage platforms and winding rows of conveyer belts. Some were still active, filling the building with the steady sounds of whirring machinery.

In the middle of a clear space between two sections of platforms, an intersection where the forklifts could pass through, was a man in gleaming blue and silver armor, bedecked with a pair of horns, and glowing red eyes. Mysteriok stood with his arms crossed, looming over the assorted heroes, all splayed out on the ground like they were paralyzed. Two women, an Asian woman dressed in all black, and what looked like a lithe, vaguely female figure dressed in dark green bark, with a flaming pumpkin for a head. Lithe and Jackie’s Lantern, respectively.

Max stopped short, right as he got a hundred feet from the armored villain. Sal blinked, trying to orient himself as inertia caught up to him. He fought the wave of nausea and forced himself to stand tall.

“What did you stop for?” said Sal. “You should have just plowed into him.”

Max just pointed ahead and to the side a bit. Sal looked at the spot, not getting it at first. Then, he noticed the slight ripple. He glanced around; closer to the ceiling he could see a slightly more noticeable soft glow following the curve of an otherwise invisible field. Now that he’d noticed it, Sal could trace the outline of a wide, translucent dome, with Mysteriok at the center.

“I don’t recognize you,” said Mysteriok, his deep voice enhanced with a slight electronic resonance. “No matter. I highly doubt you’ll fair better than these.” He gestured to the paralyzed heroes. A second glance told Sal they were definitely awake, but seemed unable to move.

“I recognize him,” said Jackie. “He’s not half a powerful as them, from what you’ve told me.”

“Agreed,” said Lithe.

“Then he shouldn’t be a problem,” said Mysteriok.

“Shit,” muttered Max.

“Indeed,” said Mysteriok. “Do you seriously think that I would openly traipse around like a lost child? The very first thing I did was investigate my situation, and I discovered almost immediately that I was not human.” He raised his left arm and tapped the side of his gauntlet with the fingers of his right. A small, wire-frame hologram display of human male form hovered an inch over his high-tech arm covering. “A simple scan showed me that I was in fact now a being made of solid energy. A solid hologram. My thoughts nothing more than some basic personality routines somehow coded into photons, bouncing around in this shell.”

He gestured to the four fallen heroes. “Naturally, I calibrated my armor so that my stasis field projector could ensnare and manipulate such energy. It’s not much for now, but it’s enough to render these meddlesome heroes helpless. And thus contain, I can then …” He held up a hand, paused for a moment of dramatic effect, “…erase them.” He closed his fist. All four of the heroes let out a cry as they began to glow. Within seconds, their bodies disintegrated into motes of light, drifting away and winking out like sparks on the wind.

“Holy shit!” said Sal, jerking back. Max tensed, ready to bolt.

Mysteriok laughed cruelly. “Lucky you to catch site of my force field, or you would have been as ensnared as they.” He looked down at his gauntlet contemplatively. “It is rather strange, though, how all this works. Even my armor is made of the same bizarre essence, but it functions just as it would in my own reality. I suspect this energy to be some form of quantum manifestation, powering all of our abilities in this limited world.”

Sal felt a pang of dread go through him, even as a part of his mind called bullshit. Of course. Of-fucking-course. Comic book weird science bullshit dues ex machine plot devices. Of course this was never going to be easy.

“I don’t suppose you can summon someone to counter him?” said Max.

“Maybe,” he said.

“Don’t bother,” said Mysteriok. “I shall be securing that crystal for myself. Even if I am just a simulation, I am still Mysteriok.” He thrust his hand forward. “Seize them!” Even as he said it, a burst of yellowish green energy lanced forth from his palm.

Max was already yanking Sal back and zooming to the far end of the warehouse, even as Sal tightened his grib on the pillow-encased crystal. He could feel it almost burning his skin, despite the added layer of insulation. Various half-empted trailers lined a series of open bay doors, some with forklifts still inside them. A moment later, Jackie’s Lantern, her body wreathed in yellow flames, and a Lithe, who had shifted her body into a monstrous, wiry being a living smoke, flew at them at top speed.

Max saw an emergency exit several feet away, grabbed Sal, and smashed through it, slamming it back-first like he had the entryway.

“Summon something!” yelled Max. “Anything!”

“Set… me… down… first…” Sal said breathlessly. Max stopped several miles away, running the two of them into a small wooded area next to a stretch of farmland. Sal gasped and let out a grunt as the recoil of super-speed travel to caught up to him, forcing him to drop to his knees, heaving. The crystal hit the ground and rolled off a few feet away.

“Come on!” said Max. “I can think of ten guys from my world off the top of my head that would make those other four look like chumps! Summon Oasis, one of the Dragons, Celestian for fuck’s sake!”

Sal grit his teeth and shoved himself back onto his feet, whirling on Max. “Does it matter if Mysteriok can just freeze them? You heard him, the energy makes up your bodies and also fuels your powers! If he can just cold-stop the Brain’s psychic powers, Soldier’s strength, Spellcaster’s magic, and Powerfist’s energy, what good is just throwing more of the same at him?”

Max grit his teeth and let out a disgusted sigh. “Maybe he’s bluffing. Why the hell would a villain just tell you the secret to his success? That’s completely idiotic. He hadn’t even captured us yet.”

“He’s a mad scientist, they like to monologue about how brilliant they are.”

“How amateur are you?”

“I was fucking twelve when I made him up, okay? I was basing you all on fucking cartoon stereotypes back then! Jesus, most of the people from their universe are just copies of pre-existing comic book and cartoon characters with a pallet swap!” Sal huffed, the rush of emotion and the strain of the super speed escape hitting him. He leaned against the closest tree and tried to fight a wave of dizziness as he caught his breath. Neither Saint Calibur nor Spellcaster’s healing magic had toughened him up any. If he survived this, he was going to summon someone who could give him a Superman body.

“Well, I don’t know what else to do,” said Max. “Short of collapse that factory on top of him and hope it crushes him.”

“Armor would protect him. He’s maybe only half as strong or tough as you at your best, but the armor’s got all sorts of devices.” He glanced at the crystal. It was now glowing brightly. Even in the growing light of morning, the trees shaded them enough that the crystal stood out like search light. It was hard to look at directly, rippling with swirling colors. Sal picked the pillow back up and covered the crystal with it.

“Maybe we can just throw that thing at him?” suggested Max.

“If he can manipulate the energy, I don’t think that will help,” said Sal. “He’d probably just catch it in mid-air.” He was about to say more, when suddenly, a blast of energy shot down from above. Max barely had time to leap in front of it, maxing out his durability to take the blast and land on top of Sal, shielding him.

Unfortunately, the force of the blast slammed him down in such a way that he was pushed against an exposed part of the crystal. Just like that, vanished.

“Stupid heroes,” said the voice of Mysteriok. He dropped down through the smoking hole in the canopy he’d just made, hitting with an impressive impact that kicked up the dirt around him. “Always so self-sacrificing. Never thinking beyond the moment. I learned to control the energy of that device. Of course I would be able to track you by it.”

Sal was paralyzed, the wind knocked out of him. Max had indeed protected him from the energy blast, but now, that left him with no allies to help out. Mysteriok kicked the crystal out of Sal’s arms, using Sal’s arm as a buffer to do it. The bones snapped like twigs and Sal screamed.

Mysteriok looked down upon him, like some armor clad avatar of destruction. “Silence!” he bellowed. Sal, through sheer terror, froze up, his voice catching. “The only reason you are alive is because you’ve had contact with that crystal device. Tell me everything you know about it, and I will consider sparing you.”

Sal sucked in air, trying to speak, gritting his teeth through the pain and lack of air. The armored villain sighed and held out his hand. Yellow-green energy crackled off the palm. “Hurry it up.”

Sal forced himself to think. There had to be a way out of this. He tried to think of summoning someone, anyone, but no one else appeared. He realized he had to be touching the crystal. It was too far away to even lunge for before Mysteriok blasted him. And with the mad scientist able to shut down anything he summoned, what would be the point?

“Fine,” said Mysteriok. “I’ll just figure it out myself.” The energy in the villain’s hand glowed brighter as he charged up his shot.

“Wait boss!” came a voice. Lithe and Jackie’s Lantern came up behind him. Jackie’s perpetual pumpkin grin leered down at him, flames licking the terrifying visage. “If you’re gunna to kill him anyway, let me have him. If he does know something, I can make him sing real nice. If not, well, he does look nice and juicy. He’d make a nice chew toy.”

Mysteriok grunted, then powered down his gauntlet. “Fine,” he said, and started stalking towards the crystal, looking down at it from a few feet away, contemplating how to handle it.

Oh god, oh fuck, thought Sal. Was this actually happening? Was comic book plot contrivance going to give him a second chance? His mind whirled. Come on, come on, think! He had no powers, no allies, what could he say to stall or trick these villains?

Apparently he took too long, because Jackie punched him in the broken arm. Sal’s vision went white and he tried to scream, but he’d been sharply exhaling already and had no breath left. He writhed in pain, clutching at his broken arm, feeling the bones sticking out through the flesh. Oh, god, he hadn’t even noticed the blood until now. If the villains didn’t kill him, he was probably going to bleed to death.

“Well, boy?” said Jackie in a menacing hiss. “Anything to say?”

“Yes, you fat oaf,” said Mysteriok. “My sensors tell me this crystal is the source of the energy that forms us. What were you doing with it? Was it you who formed us?”

Yes, you stupid fuck, thought Sal, anger pushing through his fear and pain. It was ludicrous. His own creations were going to torture and kill him, and they wouldn’t even know the true significance of what Mysteriok just said. Mysteriok wouldn’t know—

—wait. What else would Mysteriok not know? He only knew the crystal held the energy. He probably only kicked it out his grip the way he had, just to hurt him, because he got off on being cruel. He only hadn’t touched it yet, because he just didn’t know anything about it.

“I… I…” he gasped. Jackie moved to hit him again, but Lithe grabbed her arm, forcing her to wait. Mysteriok stepped back to him and loomed over him. Sal felt like an ant about to be crushed by his boot.

“Yes?” he said, menacingly.

Sal prayed he was right about this, and about Mysteriok’s ignorance.

“I-i-it’s like a… a wishing stone…” Sal said, straining to speak through the pain. “A… genie’s lamp… I don’t know the mechanism, but… I just held it and… wished for things. I couldn’t control it… you all came out… I thought… I don’t know… what the fuck I thought… wished for… a more exciting life…so… so stupid… no idea what it was… until it was too late…”

Mysteriok laughed, causing Sal to wince. “Idiot,” he said. “Well, worry about it no more. It’s in proper hands now.”

Sal held his breath as the villain bent down to pick up the crystal… and vanished the moment he touched it. Sal couldn’t help but grin. “Now whose the idiot, fuck face?” he hissed. Cartoon supervillains always loved their shiny magic rocks of mysterious power. Mysteriok had collected a few in his career already, why would he suspect this rock would do anything different from the rest?

Jackie and Lithe gasped, jumping back. “What the fuck?” said Jackie. She ran over to Sal and kicked him. “What did you do?”

The kick almost made him black out as his broken arm was jostled. Jackie sucked in a breath, and her flames flared brightly. Sal squeezed his eyes shut and grit his teeth, preparing to be roasted alive. This was it. He’d done the best he could. He was going to die, leaving this whole mess unfinished.

“Hold it,” said Lithe. She was in human form again, and she grabbed Jackie by the shoulder, pulling her to the side.

Jackie, her fire blast interrupted, hacked and coughed up a weak burst of flame. She double over, coughing, gouts of smoke and flame puffing out weakly. Lithe let her catch her breath as Sal opened his eyes. Jackie cleared her throat, smoke curling up between the triangular teeth of her jack-o-lantern mouth, and rasped, “Jesus, you cunt, don’t interrupt a girl mid-breath!”

“It’s over, Jackie,” said Lithe.

“Over? Are you kidding? With that armored blowhard gone, and none of those heroes to stop us, we can do whatever the fuck we want!” She turned to Sal. “Starting with gutting and roasting this weasely mother fucker!”

“I figured you’d say that,” said Lithe. Then, before Jackie could react, she grabbed the jack-o-lantern girl by the shoulders while forcing her to trip against her leg. Jackie, thrown of balance, was helpless to stop the woman from throwing her over Sal’s body and onto the crystal. Jackie promptly vanished.

Lithe stepped over Sal. “You’re going to want to get that looked at immediately,” she said, motioning to his arm. She then leaned down, touched the crystal, and vanished.

Sal wasn’t entirely sure what to make of this turn of events. More plot contrivance? He realized that even though he’d shifted her between a few different settings, he hadn’t put much thought into Lithe other than to make her the typical reserved ninja assassin. Maybe she just didn’t see a future in a world where people might be more interested in picking apart her superpowers instead of hiring her for hit jobs. Or maybe, without her old contacts or allies, she didn’t think it would be worth starting over in a new world. He vaguely recalled she had once been part of a mercenary team, and refused to kill without reason. Maybe this was that version? Assuming Mysteriok had hired her, with him gone, her only viable contract was voided.

Fucking hell, he swore he was never going to think about superhero stories again. He got up on his knees, crying out from the pain of his arm, and half-waddled/half-crawled towards the crystal. For as much of a nightmare as the thing could potentially be, what he needed right now as a healer. Once he was patched up, he’d figure out what to do next. He touched the crystal, ignoring the intense heat, and opened his mouth to say a name…

“HEY! Hey, I see one!” came a shout. “I told you I saw them drop in here!” Startled, Sal turned and saw several men stomping around the trees, shotguns and rifles aimed at him. It appeared to be a posse of townsfolk, dressed in casual clothes, anger and terror on their faces.

Sal felt his stomach drop and his voice caught in his throat as he realized what was happening. Stupidly, he raised his non-broken arm to wave at them. “W-wait!” he said. Unfortunately, he unthinkingly still had the crystal in his hand, blazing like a colorful star, looking for all the world like an energy blast about to be unleashed. As he raised the object towards the oncoming men, a shout went out.

“He’s one of them! Shoot! SHOOT HIM!”

Sal opened his mouth to summon a hero to defend him. Unfortunately, his mere human reflexes couldn’t outpace a bullet. The first salvo tore through him in a dozen different places. But that wasn’t what ended his life in that instant.

One of the bullets struck the glowing crystal dead center. In that moment, a flash of energy enveloped the entire wooded area, vaporizing everything within a quarter-mile radius, even the ground. And for the next three days, millions of people around the world reported seeing colorful bolts of energy streaking across the sky, like a rainbow of shooting stars.

THE BEGINNING