A timely rejoinder, as reversed as order itself.
Origination
Who I am is of no importance. (A sentiment rarely voiced under any context.)
As far as the lawyers are concerned this is not-for-profit fanciful fiction trickling forth in an artificial culture already well inundated with for-profit fanciful fiction, as portent as scribbles on a restroom wall, fantasy football or organized religion. As far as the writers are concerned, let this tawdry experiment in triviality, this deconstructionist union of fan-fiction and metafiction provide just cause to further drown inferiority complexes with whatever addictions consumers are imbibing these hopeless days of our fleeting lives. But as far as you need be concerned, what follows here are verbatim transcriptions from field notes of an interstitial deity, neither the Toucher, the Listener or the Taster (all notoriously preoccupied now with feeling good listening to yummy trite like the Scarlett Johansson discography), but rather the Smeller.
And what he smells is most foul, at once a parallel reality and alternate timeline, where magic and science have largely exchanged roles, where familiar visages betray unfamiliar designs yet still nobody knows who the hell Manny Hands is or was or will be.
The Fighting Captain
It began with the murder of Jack “the Marvel” Parsons, or to be specific, the years leading up to his murder.
Following the historic attack on Pearl Harbor, the USA was compelled to put its metaphorical money where its proverbial mouth was and thus enter the in-progress world war. But the dark technologies of the Axis hierarchy, the sadistic consternation of its legions, proved far more problematic an ordeal than a matter to be resolved with marketing, or by the blood, sweat and tears which American soldiers were quickly parting ways with in fields of combat everywhere from islands of the Pacific to the eastern block.
So, certain higher ups in the official chain of command looked for alternatives, attracted by the nonconformist successes of young entrepreneurs Howard Stark and Jack Parsons, the two having worked (and played) closely in their obsessive exploration of the links between sorcery and what would come to be known as astrophysics. Aleister Crowley, clandestinely operating as court magician for the British crown, had introduced the pair to one Abraham Erskine, officially a German scientist looking to expatriate to the states although in actuality was Maria Orsic of the Vril society eager to cut a deal for gender reassignment surgery. Stark and Parsons immediately saw in their contemporary Erskine a kindred spirit, and under the watchful eye of military liaison Thaddeus Ross were tasked with reworking Erskine’s Project Nietzsche into Project Rebirth, abandoning chemistry for alchemy in the sacrilegious creation of a patriotic super-soldier in hopes of winning the war. With Nazi science at the time proving more advanced than that of other nations, largely fueled by blasphemous knowledge obtained through the esoteric societies of Vril and Thule communicating with a mysterious and otherworldly intelligence, Project Rebirth as well would not settle on results of science alone.
So was the militant homunculus birthed into the world, to be secretly powered by the undead spirits of each and every USA soldier regularly sacrificed by their government’s Powers That Be, each and every one witlessly referred to by Pentagon insiders as “Bucky”. Their violent ends a purity test, their loyalty oaths beyond public pledges of allegiance guaranteeing a continued indentured servitude so that following their deaths on battlefields, their souls were to be drained to nothingness like celestial batteries, relentlessly fueling the army of one as the homunculus in turn tirelessly combats threats both foreign and domestic for the stars and stripes. National headlines outright loved its growing kill-count.
Unbeknownst to its progenitors however, was its growing madness, its over-reliance on symbols of god and country and of capital shrouding from its conscience the individuals underneath, the life which no symbol alone can create, as even those human causalities compelled beyond the confines of their respective mortal livelihoods into powering the homunculus were footnotes among the lives it claimed directly. After a particularly disastrous mission towards the end of the war where bad decisions by the super-soldier, this man made inhumane, resulted with endangering not simply the lives of those around it but its very own in an arctic disappearance, the trio of macabre scientists conducted a Babalon Working to summon that same otherworldly intelligence which had aided the Nazis, for assistance in locating their toy, learning too late the identity of the intelligence as herald of something far more powerful, and hungry.
Calculating the placement of the intelligence in the time-stream as being an astronomical distance from Earth reachable by the herald’s master within their own lifetimes, the scientists panicked, and turned on one another. Erskine’s death was quickly pinned on a saboteur employed by the Axis, but Parsons knew that regardless of the threat the world would face, his reluctance to Stark’s ambition of further weaponizing on behalf of Uncle Sam their breakthroughs in conjoining the sciences to the mystic arts would prove his undoing, and so it did.
Philosophy of Shields and Vaults
In 1946, US armed forces working in conjunction with MI:13 launched a top secret expedition to locate the super-soldier homunculus. Largely funded by Howard Stark, the mission was led by Jimmy Woo of the FBI and Peggy Carter of the OSS, Carter having worked in the field as handler for the homunculus during the war. Assisting in the search were the Invaders, the colonialist strike team of MI:13 peacekeepers as led by Lord Montgomery Falsworth and comprised of agents provocateur Robert Frank, Madeline Joyce, Jim Hammond, Thomas Raymond and Mary Mitchell, Roger Aubrey, Wendy Hunt, Thomas Lovejoy, Roger Dicken and Patrick Mason. What they found instead was an entrance to the fabled Subterranea, and “monsters as big as mountains” which devoured fully half of the sorely unprepared operation. Of the survivors, some never saw their faculties recovered, with the only operatives to survive with both mind and body unscathed being Woo and Carter. Their mission debrief prompted quite a lot of established history and predetermined information to be tossed to the wayside.
Just months later, at the other end of the Earth while all nations busy with wound-licking, the US Navy intercepts a signal which code-breakers interpret as verification of a rumor lingering beyond war’s end, a rumor concerning a secret Nazi facility somewhere in the antarctic, where research and development of fearful engines of righteous malevolence persist despite collapse of the Third Reich. A joint military exercise is then conducted clandestinely, what men and what weapons, what ships and airships of allied forces surviving the war gathered for one last hurrah. The field commander was Nick Fury, a decorated combat veteran offered the opportunity in hopes of deterring the CIA recruiters eager to exploit his skill-sets and training for the intelligence community. Reenlisting to fight alongside the Howling Commandos again was reason enough for his sadomasochism. What they meet with past the frozen peninsulas of Antarctica was no Nazi installation however, but a listening station of an alien race known as the Kree, staffed by lone soldier Mar-Vell. His species in long-standing war with another alien species known as Skrull, his post on the fringes tasked with guarding over a static portal to the hell of yet another species of aliens, an ancient race of fallen angels and their reptilian offspring. A half-blinded Fury, riding back with what ships and airships to survive the plot-twisting mutates therein himself coins as identifier for the portal, the Savage Land. In his later debriefing with the Bilderberg Group, he remarks betwixt phallic cigars “This old one-eyed snake isn’t blind to what’s piercing the veils since Uncle Sam got his super-soldier, but if we cannot now have a nonliving symbol and its weapon of choice shielding western civilization’s technological tomorrows, then we need to establish a new shield to instead serve, protect and defend the wisdom of the ancients, because that is what won the war. We need more dark magic, or science will put an end to the fun and games. We need a SHIELD emblazoned with appeasing it.”
And so, in the 1950s did the USA federal government’s military industrial complex and intelligence community cough up their very best to staff this new initiative, headed by Fury directly and with the Spear of Longinus smelted and surgically implanted to replace his Adam’s rib, eternally. The Howling Commandos were drafted to be initial field leaders. Jimmy Woo and Peggy Carter transfer accordingly as agents in perpetuity. Semi-retired adventurer Dominic Fortune is recruited to establish its Cabalistic spy network, inadvertently laying the groundwork for what later would be reappropriated into the Mossad. Immortal though admittedly savage vandal Ulysses Bloodstone is recruited as lead archivist and Gnostic provocateur, enticer of machinations long condemned by and exploited by the Vatican, stockpiling and further encrypting wisdom passed down from the likes of King Solomon himself. Inventor Phineas Horton oversees the reverse-engineering division, Howard Stark turning increasingly distracted by other matters, primarily his surreptitiously seeking out the next generation of prodigies, to surreptitiously sponsor and guide into appeasing the appetites of the herald’s ever-approaching master with a taster’s choice of humanity’s finest for consumption, to spare the world. The adolescents, sacrificial lambs crossing paths from think-tank to think-tank, playfully dub themselves the atomic knights.
In the 1960s, in the aftermath of the herald’s master arriving and facing defeat at the hands of one of those adolescents now grown, SHIELD begat Aladdin, dedicated to studying and controlling the growing numbers affected by veils wearing thin from SHIELD’s own research and development, and to locate potential remedies for the potential problem presented by that master-slayer adolescent and his atomic knight cohorts, all by then forging paths of nonconformist success with full knowledge that doing what thou wilt was the whole of the law. In the 1970s Aladdin in turn begets Project PEGASUS, to explore energy sources para-dimensional to our point in the space-time continuum, increasingly drawn to or originating from conquests by these atomic knights. As a Russian doll, in the 1980s Project PEGASUS begets the Vault, a maximum security penitentiary for indefinitely detaining test subjects and potential test subjects, casualties of the atomic knights and potential threats to the atomic knights. In the 1990s, the Vault’s governmental facilitator Hank Pym, another of those adolescents now grown and grown tired, personally makes the call to self-destruct the prison, covering tracks of a shady past while at once offering a massive blood sacrifice. Amplified by his Pym particles, he hopes the damning fires of the hundreds of transmogrified souls to enact a gossamer, to shield the Earth from an encroaching cosmic terror assembling tesseracts of infinite power enough to ravel the universe. His plan fails.
Although he does succeed in jettisoning prison warden GENIE into deep space after its refusal to self-sacrifice where, millions of years later it meets, courts and marries Ego, the living planet. The one occasion which their offspring viewed herself in the mirror was what prompted the first incarnation of Despair of the Endless to end her life, proving more agreeable than any AI nonetheless, and while surpassing the capabilities of her parentage.
Avengeful Reformer Tales
The last will and testament of Howard Stark contained little else but the precise coordinates for the location of the missing super-soldier homunculus, a secret he knew for how long none would ever know, but a secret he took to his grave after prolonged bouts with tertiary stage syphilis. In accordance with his final wishes, sole beneficiary for his estate was son Tony Stark, who by this time in the early 1960s had grown into a promising practitioner of militarized simony. The only atomic knight to actually wear armor, engraved in sigils from angelic scripture and demonic runes alike, it was the most demanding but most rewarding of his vast collection of artifacts weaponized for profit. His second biggest bragging point was the team of atomic knights, friends and allies and competitors one and all, whom he arguably bewitched into a personality cult, himself as centerpiece.
Bruce Banner was easiest, his obsession with purple leisure suits ruining every job interview no matter the government contract, and thus provoking a sordid issue with alcohol abuse. On more than a few occasions of blackout drunkenness, he would be known to strip down, running the streets for hours loudly quoting from memory long passages of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic of literature, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Such tendencies prevented any career advancement despite none else expanding so far the known boundaries of the electromagnetic spectrum, so that he was in fact eager for the paycheck to finance more and more oblivion. Hank Pym, another atomic knight, likewise had amounted to failure, proven time and again incapable of success in any sphere aside from reconstituting molecular structures; a master whose domain was an ant-farm. Victor Von Doom was the lone challenge, his vanity being his only passion in life was a small price to pay for the level of natural acumen he brought to incantations by the atomic knights, obligations which freed up the mass of his time for carnal debauchery. Which, having defeated the herald’s galactic master, he had rightfully earned.
Reed Richards had been the one atomic knight refusing to comply with wishes from the house of Stark. He had led his own team exploring a hellmouth without proper protection spells, cursing them to become their biggest sins. Richards found himself changed into the Creeping Flesh, his arrogance keeping all other persons at arm’s length no longer the defining thing keeping him away from conscientious relationships. His girlfriend Sue Storm, his fact-checker, his spell-checker, his proofreader and script doctor and ghostwriter, found herself with strength to part from the codependency, though unable to part from this corporeal world. From then on forever mostly invisible and mostly intangible, she cries in silence as the Sorrowful Maiden. Her younger brother Johnny Storm who like Otis Redding was hard to handle, at least for all those who never studied Ayn Rand, found himself changed into the Burning Man, an unending example in human form of where recklessly bad ideas must go to die. It would take months for his screaming to subside, and several years for him to grow used to the smell of his own cooking flesh, cooking flesh that is always afire yet never burnt. The private pilot to the wealthy Storm family, veteran airman Benjamin Grimm, found himself so weighed down by an implosion of gravity emanating from his bowels he could not help but to crush every beautiful thing he encounters with his dense but expanding mounds of compressed matter. A walking grave filled with anguish, he changes his name legally to the Behemoth the same fateful afternoon he cancels his subscription to Weird Pulp magazine.
Having calculated his very own to be the most superior form of intelligence on the planet, Richards voiced this information to the arriving tower of alien nightmare that was hungry master to the Aryan herald which contrived a world war to preemptively weaken Earth’s defenses. He then adds that if the hungry tower of alien nightmare would care to settle for his own brave super-genius, and so spare the rest of the world, then he, Richards, would be unable to follow through with his secret but genius plan for stopping the hungry tower of alien nightmare. Which actually gave the galactic threat pause, but just long enough for everyone watching in person to turn toward the sound of gunfire, where all partook in the sight of a swooping Victor Von Doom with his James Dean-good looks holding the smoking Ultimate Nullifier, swiped from nearby Kirby dots which he noted were actually portals to other dimensions including a world of four color melodrama where the Ultimate Nullifier existed but where shooters not spared by chaos magic also met their end. Making an exit wound of what just prior had been the face of Richards. At which point in the distraction, Doom then drops the office building headquartered by Richards and company which he conveniently had at the orbital ready for revolting development, dropping it down toward the head of the galactic hunger as Doom’s invocations prompt the old-fashioned brick building to change its nature, atoms transmuted into antimatter of equal mass with a weight to Nth levels of compression beyond what atomic structures of third dimensional physics are capable of justifying, so that upon impact the antimatter office building smashes the galactic hunger’s head in half, his entire form halved in dissipating aspects like a black hole finally done with its business. The maddening void where the galactic hunger once existed will be coined by cub reporter Ben Urich as the Negative Zone. Which Doom’s third enchantment summons inside itself, the Negative Zone banished to existence within the Negative Zone. Three wishes for the soul of his mother had proven his wisest achievement.
And so Victor Von Doom, barony of good fortunes, saved the world. Seeing him proving Howard Stark fallible in such a way, Tony saw in Doom his every aspiration. Allowing Doom to take credit for finding the homunculus would be a small price to pay considering Tony alone had all of his father’s notes for how to tether the accursed thing which can never die. Keep your friends close indeed but bedfellows make strange politics.
The Piscean Age
The dark magicks unleashed by Stark, Parsons and Erskine in their unholy union of science and sorcery, for the purposes of birthing the homunculus super-soldier, prompted a continuous tearing in the fabric of space and time. Expanded atomic and then nuclear testings by the USA government over ensuing decades would pierce further holes in the fabric of being, like a cigarette haphazardly burning holes in the mosquito netting of the jungle’s safest place, but debacles of arcane research and development begun by Project Rebirth and endlessly pursued by SHIELD thereafter guaranteed that animus and anima planet-wide would no longer be mutable constructs. As such, Tony Stark and his circle of prodigious, self-styled atomic knights assembled by his father opted to unchain their inner demons through ongoing, violent masquerade.
Tony Stark as the invincible though glutinous Iron Monolith, overseeing the team of costumed adventurers with his horde of reliquaries. Victor Von Doom was as vain and self-righteous though far more greedy, alone surpassing Stark in fascination with the new technologies of the mystical arts. Bruce Banner‘s addictions unveiling himself as the son to a wrath demon of the seventh circle of Hell, to spite his own futility, christens his erratic transformations into a physical embodiment of the id as a blessed release. Hank Pym denying his own prideful nature in the fields of altering himself, his personality and his physical mass alike, chooses as totem the conformist ant, helmed in impish tribute. Janet van Dyne, the embattled wife of Pym, embraces the envy to her own obsessive-compulsive disorders by impish tribute as well, asserting the fluttering subjectivity of fashionable whim over the lacking objectivity of her own constitution. The athlete turned soldier Adam Brashear masks his sloth as excellence with undergoing the same meaningless achievements as undergone by countless others, weaponizing his faults as weaknesses for others and ultimately competing with his own emptiness for vainglorious rewards. Thor Odinson, a Teutonic deity summoned by Stark and imprisoned by Stark inside the pocket dimension of a magic lamp, lives to fulfill his own lust with each and every word and action, as is the very nature of all gods or demons. Together, they are sold by Stark on the idea of bettering the world, their individual egos well open to the nuance of misconstruing their personal biases and desires, fetishes and quirks, as what the natural world beyond their individual egos either requires or yearns. Each existing to declare authorship of the world to suit their own standards, together they unwittingly remake the world to suit the designs of Stark.
Upon rescuing the body of the homunculus that was frozen nearly twenty years in the arctic wasteland, a mission led by Doom but facilitated by Stark himself, the team adapts the super-soldier as their own, granting it field leadership of the team, an undead symbol to mask and shield their private vices beneath. The masses, loving symbols generally for the reprieve they grant from personal responsibility, are ecstatic at the fabled warrior’s return. The masses, oblivious to its empowerment by the very souls of flesh and blood American soldiers killed in wars across the globe instigated by financial interests of their elected governance, either not knowing or not caring how insane the monstrosity inherently is nor how increasingly maddening it becomes. Over the 1960s and 1970s in solo missions executed on behalf of the USA government, the homunculus proves capable of channeling its bloodlust for the sakes of Powers That Be brushing aside interests competing for dominance, singularly devastating the organized crime perpetrated by the Maggia and the organized punishment perpetrated by the Secret Empire. And fighting alongside Stark’s atomic knights avenging their own egos slighted by the world they purport to defend, the homunculus puts a stop to the warring between alien species of Kree and Skull spilling forth across the Earth by obliterating both home-worlds. The alien captain Mar-Vell, betraying his own race for safe harbor being met with further betrayal, his own death as yet another casualty of the nonliving symbol made animate.
By the 1980s, nearly twenty years more since its thawing, as its expansively incessant murders and rapes proved evasive for even the most inventive justifications, the government tasked SHIELD with direct intervention. As the lone success of the Project Rebirth experiments, the homunculus was now entered into a new set of reconstructions, becoming patient zero in the Deathlok program where, utilizing a variation of the tech initiated by Phineas Horton in the 1940s and later expanded by SHIELD through bastardized voodoo as Life-Model Decoys, portions of its being were replaced with cybernetic components. To further exploit weaponization of the damnable thing, yes, but to better balance the sorcery driving it with science, as though making it a more controllable killer would make it a more refined killer. What was crafted was a more efficient killing machine, a modern, necrotic samurai with hardware where once was cerebral cortex and armaments where once was copyrighted shield. The cyborg homunculus would inadvertently impart upon the much-aligned mutant population of the world around it a matter to be known as the Techno-Organic Virus with every exhalation, every droplet of its sweat, blood and tears. A reasonable side-effect when eventually ascertained by the SHIELD brain-trust, but the devolution of the homunculus upset the wishes of Tony Stark to such degrees that he’d momentarily declare war upon all the armories of science worldwide, under guise of fighting friendly fire with hellfire incarnate as the Antiwar Machine.
After all, what is dead cannot be enslaved, the homunculus and the self-avowed supremacy of its nationalistic symbology proving nothing else by its own words and actions across the deadly decades. A species rendered dead need no king be it mankind or alien or mutant. Where the homunculus sought to destroy all life, empowering symbols over what life they were drawn to represent, Stark sought to preserve all life, subjugating all life to fuel his own entitlements, his own privilege. The world yet again confronted by mistakes of its most hero-worshiped, and so were the seeds of a civil war sowed.
Those Who Sit Above In Shadow
On the 7th of June, 1958, Stanley Lieber, Sol Brodsky, Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby and Joe Maneely saw what the future held in store. Setting the stage, Atlas Comics had gone defunct, and Lieber was considering leaving the field of floppies altogether, where his work writing and editing had met with mixed results, nullifying his Capitalist fantasies. Until his friendly neighborhood pot dealer Irving Forbush drew him to something all-new and all-different, a strange visitor offering the high evolutionary.
Some years prior, Stephen Strange had earned his medical degree and was well on his way to becoming one of the leading physicians in the country, until arrogance and a night of drunken tomfoolery resulted with the shattering of his hands in an automobile accident. None save himself, had the skills necessary to save himself. Months of depression ensued, with Strange falling deeper and deeper into the void of his own ego, growing more and more desperate for a differing effect to its cause. The moment he acknowledged to himself his willingness to do anything, to go anywhere to repair his outer and inner damages, was when they appeared. Abducted into the sky aboard one of their mysterious vessels, the alien race known as the Dance would show him many marvels. Across time and space was he instilled with mastery of astronomy, mastery of physics and mastery of chemistry. Although their motives were never made clear, through their impossible machinery which made the passing of centuries feel like a handful of years to his body and mind, was he shown every iota of conceivable datum in regards to what constitutes the geologic, hydrologic, and atmospheric sciences, until the pulse of his heartbeats flayed out the entirety of Pi. He no longer simply understood what the ancient Greeks knew as logos, but rather he became logos incarnated, its avatar and proxy. And then, hundreds of years of consciousness aboard their mysterious ship across time and space come and gone, they departed, leaving him precisely where he had wrecked his life, leaving him to rebuild. And he calculated exactly how to begin.
Identifying the Philosopher’s stone as being no less of a verb than god itself, Strange mixed a strange concoction of crystal and herbs from the roots of creation, for the men who would commercialize escapist fanfare to partake in the real labor of their own fruits. And so they partied. Brodsky, Ditko, Kirby and Maneely were gathered by an outwitted Lieber for what they all presumed would be a stormbraining session for a new line of superhero comics, selling to impressionable minds Objectivist fantasies, where might makes right and the ends justify the means. But over the course of the rainy day, amidst the strange visitor’s strange concoction they were instead held captive by their future, and by the futures which their works would impart in their mortal wake. Hours skulk by as they helplessly observe the entirety of output from what would become a penthouse of ideas in decades to come, the five men suffering the capitalized power fantasies of each and every word balloon of every panel of every page and the crossover multimedia satelliting its licensing to be, the unrealized wet-dreams of thousands of commercial artists and millions of consumers alike. At random points in the haze they inadvertently interact with samplings of their own creations as characters themselves, the creations aware in the encounters only of the strange dichotomy there between creators and created, and in turn seeing only Those Who Sit Above In Shadow.
Afterwards, in his stumbles home, Maneely was left so distraught and sick by what he witnessed that he would throw himself into the pathway of a commuter train. The others lived on, though with ever-diminishing capacities for separating reality from fiction.
Dr. Stephen Strange, Intellectualist Supreme, proceeded to fix the hands of god.
Protagonistas, Defendants and Champs
The half-Atlantean, half-homo sapien monarch Namor abruptly entered the world-stage during the conflicts comprising the rise and fall of the Third Reich, whether leading Atleantean forces in defense against the Nazi attempts at overtaking his soggy mother country, or hunting them relentlessly on his own, his sovereignty as relentless as the ebb and flow of the tides themselves. Never would he ally with Allied Forces, or give assistance to any of the other embattled peoples opposing the Nazis around the globe, for his sovereignty was a dominion of Earth’s waters and nothing more, nothing less. Towards the end of the warring, as the United States debuted atomic bombings perversely known as fat man and little boy upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well did they launch a third atomic missile at Atlantis, fearing a later uprising by what evidently was the one force on the planet both willing and able to challenge Nazi conquest without designs for reaping rewards. Nicknamed harlot, the explosive leveled the ancient city-state to memory as boiling seas ironically murder alongside its entire populace Namor’s triad of diplomatic consorts, Namora of the Atleanteans, Sersi of the Eternals and Venus of the Olympians.
Though blasted into near-death, Namor alone survived, finding himself washed ashore some weeks later in New York Harbor, with too many years thereafter wasted humiliatingly as an amnesiac vagrant. An unsolicited kiss on the cheek from the passing flirtations of the Sorrowful Maiden, such the emptiest of housewives that any tramp will do whilst needful to get touched real good, undid the emotional blocks in a heartbeat of misdirected blood-flow.
The Aryan herald of the galactic hunger, tasked with psychically instigating the world war explicitly to weaken Earth’s defenses in preparation for the coming of his master, had physically arrived in advance to lay waste to any lingering self-determination, only to find a species unnervingly reminiscent of the long-dead peoples of his home-world. Drawn to the power of Namor, the violent confrontation compelled Norrin Radd to see in this mortal a fellow master fallen, but where Radd had been made to turn servant, Namor retained if not a conscious sovereignty over himself then an unconscious predilection for nothing more and nothing less. Perplexed and inspired, Radd saw in Namor a reflection of who he himself might be, were he willful enough to disallow either irresistible forces or immovable objects from laying claim to his convictions or principles. The sadness of Namor’s losses were comparably of no difference to his own, but as well were they no reasoning for subjugating others to the same loss. To be neither a victim or a victimizer his heraldry must be abandoned, but all the more must no master ever be fed, mentally or physically.
The timely arrival of Dr. Stephen Strange would show the both of them precisely how to go about such an endeavor, how the endgame of self-dependence was not about necessitating a retribution or reparation, any of which disaffects the well-being of sovereign others through codependency or coercion, but rather a reconciliation within, existing without offering or demanding a retribution or reparation, because whether provoking approval or provoking disdain a redemption reliant on the perceptions of others is mere marketing. Even short of being fully autonomous, equality isn’t the sharing of rewards from above but the sharing of sacrifice from below. They soon gather to their number lonely Bruce Banner, whose helplessly defensive id was invariably ousted from the assembly of atomic knights over his undesirable nature failing to prioritize the biases, fetishes, quirks and whims of Tony Stark’s superego. And multimillionaire Kyle Richmond, whose brutal obsessions with vilifying the poor led him to a broken contract with the devil, replacing his own eyes with those robbed from Satan so that he might better perceive the evil lurking in all things, learning too late that his personal understanding of evil was altogether subjective and ego-driven, coming strictly from a place of entitlements and privilege and private wish-fulfillment. Defending an individualism of self-sufficiency requiring neither using and abusing others or allowing themselves to be used and abused by others, none of them would ever again play the role of master to others or servant to others, but for a time pursuers of interests far less human than either.
Satan thus rendered as blind as justice however, he himself would in turn shortly sire the Hellstorm siblings Daimon and Satana, mistaking their insatiably unbeknownst mother for something unwholesome and Freudian as a mermaid, an amazing adult fantasy come undone. From the age of 23 on for the duration of his prolonged life, Daimon would serve as mayor in perpetuity of Washington, DC, his dark princedom meeting and agreeing with the Peter principle concisely. Satana would find a somewhat quieter life for herself in Kentucky, riding this lap to freedom.
The Merry Marvel Marching Society And Superhuman Registration Act
Following early successes by Stark’s assemblage of atomic knights, murderously avenging their self-interests regardless of perceived threat with casualties ranging from the Circus of Crime to the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, eventually Stark realized their own actions and inaction worked as a chain reaction. This marvelously antihero age of Neo-mysticism he fostered was producing more and more abnormalities among the population, more and more idiosyncrasies in the relationship between cause and effect. His contacts within the upper echelon of SHIELD were taking their own precautions to better survey and quarantine the growing predicament, though he himself found tremendous logic in no longer simply serving as commandant propelling exertion of the ideal will upon others, but rather his teammates expansively serving as generals themselves, each overseeing elements to this new dimension in human shields on his behalf. A manner of recruitment drive was launched, spanning many years, prospective candidates from around the world scouted and approached and given the option to align with his ambitions of a hierarchical world peace, or to stand as enemies of the state. The warrior king T’Challa of Wakanda famously and repeatedly refused, his mutant bride Ororo Munroe taking great offense at the super-powered eradication of inopportune homo-superiors worldwide. Jack of Hearts as well declined such initiative, seeing himself as a lover rather than a fighter. Many others however, enlisted in the rampant acts of vengeful vigilantism free of judge or jury. Many of them wanton fugitives of international laws or reformed criminals, unable or unwilling to lessen the impacts of their personal egos. A vast and militarized community was forged by these persons setting themselves above and beyond any legal or moral code, a community of self-appointed peacekeepers murdering all those with reasons for being other than giving of themselves to Stark’s grand designs. Yet over the course of the 1980s there were new generations, comprised of new mutants and new warriors who defiantly objected to the bilateral politics, neither wishing to sacrifice others or to be sacrificed themselves and thus proving themselves too innocent or too ignorant to be aware of how blood magic itself predated the very language purporting their expletives.
Whether fighting for the assertions of righteous ego or fighting to defy and deny righteous ego, the one act they all held in common was the endless fighting. Hardly the keeping of any peace. Ego claims everything, ultimately, but never gets irony.
Exegesis
All too aware of the abject futility inherent to the mutant struggle, the hopelessness of winning moral arguments against voices incessantly wondering whether mutant lives matter or not, a sampling of homo-superior jettisoned the scene altogether, shortly after a demonic inferno transformed Manhattan into a landscape where sporting visible under-boob would forever be more than welcome regardless of the crashed vehicles or broken marriages to result.
Lila Cheney and Alison Blaire had been wanting to collaborate creatively for quite some time regardless. Lila and Sam Guthrie wanted to finally make the opportunity to see where a relationship might go, just as Alison and Longshot wanted to pick up where their own thing had left off sometime earlier betwixt misfires and misadventures. So, with the untapped potential of Lila’s own Dyson sphere as HQ, there as safe-haven all along, they opt to become the greatest rock band the multiverse had ever suffered. Lila on lead geetar and Alison on keyboards, the two sharing and alternating vox, with Sam showing his Bluegrass finger-picking skills on acoustic rhythm and Longshot’s luck proving his four digits ideal for the 5-string bass. With kinetic enthusiasm Lila’s former bodyguard Guido Carosella signs on as new drummer. Beautiful Dreamer of the Morlocks explores her dream smoke as agent/manager, faithfully decrying “No albums and no streaming! Live shows only!” While Tar Baby, also of the Morlocks, quickly proves himself the only roadie they’d ever possibly need. All quite eager to leave behind the drama, and with opening band MEZZ were they all well on their way to bringing a bwa-ha-ha to galaxies that were neither blue or gold but as dark as the ultimate will of the One-Above-All, who eventually smites the band for no better reason but his failure to score a backstage pass.
Advanced Idea Mechanics
Arno Stark was the brother of Tony Stark, and also his son. Following the demise of the manipulative patriarch Howard Stark, Tony was compelled beyond foresight to personally lay claim to every conquest and domination of his father’s, possessed through lying, cheating and stealing for the perpetuation of his masquerades of success, and now repossessed by wayward son for the same inevitable ends. The Stark trademark no longer referencing the pipe-dreams of Howard Stark but exclusively those of Tony Stark, all things which were Howard’s would now be owned and surpassed in achievements by Tony, including the prize of Howard’s widow Maria. Initially she hid the pregnancy from him, but after a few years even Tony’s endless distractions of fancy gave way. At 5 years of age, Arno appealed to Tony in a bedeviled manner, this rare thing granting him new labels of father and brother all at once. That admiration turned to admonition as he witnessed the boy taking a red wagon full of kitchen appliances from a yard sale, transmogrifying the components into a functioning computer within moments. His natural prowess for technological innovation made Tony sick, so sick that he weighed the bargain made with the devil Mephisto by friend and lover Doom, in which the free market enabled Doom to trade the soul of his own mother for three wishes. Figuring mother nor child to be worth so much, he disowned the child, his only child, leaving him naked and frightened outside the entrance to a nondescript orphanage on the other side of the country. His mother he entrapped inside the magic lamp which bound the Odinson, to be disarrayed by lustful Teutonic barbarism.
Growing up through the 1970s penniless and eventually homeless, Arno remembered few details of his early life, only the feelings of abandonment by the persons closest to him, their favoring such arrogantly mystical irreverence as defining one’s universe to factual realities of cause and effect where the natural order of that same universe defines and redefines everyone and everything for lack of engaging nonsense. Before he was finished progressing through puberty he launches his first tech startup, selling ingenious software so uncanny as to generate a cult-following in a culture which long ago exchanged preference and dependence in technical sciences for arcane hoodoo and magical buzzwords. His company, A.I.M., expands fastly and exponentially to launch this world’s first online search engine on its way to becoming the world’s wealthiest tech mega-corporation, with its most popular service being a social media network. If his father, his brother, would selfishly remake the world in his own image by way of sorcery, then he would return the compliment himself by way of algorithms. Without need of standing on the corpse of his own father, he reaches higher than the stars themselves.
“Arno Is Master” thinks the inbred savant to himself habitually.
But those algorithms, whose auto-programming persist to this very day, avatars and proxies for persons long dead chattering away mindlessly through the aether of space and time, auto-posting and reacting with further auto-posting as his misery, his life, his conglomerate, his world and his universe came to a conclusion back in the 1990s, as a death-worshiping alien menace met with its own variety of success in uniting tesseracts of infinite power, infinite power enough to end everything, including this tale.