[Timedrop23]

IntroSpections #4: Through the Fire and Flames

The effect the fire had on the Plague was immediate. The squeal I had heard inside my head came again, this time as a fully audible shriek of agonized fury that vibrated my skull and made the door on the cigarette case shatter behind me, sending tiny, jagged breadcrumbs of safety glass plinking to the tiled floor. To my shock, the Plague began growing spines and whipping appendages and snapping jaw-like structures in a fit of poorly directed, futile rage.
I felt a stabbing pain in my right wrist as one of the jaw-things managed to bite me, and knew I could not ward off such a formidable creature with such a small flame.
But I kept it burning all the same as I ran once again, making the short but agonizing journey to the aisle where we sell lighter fluid.
Not to get you Loyal Readers sidetracked from the imminent danger Past Me has currently found himself in, but the barbecue supply aisle at my store always seemed to convey a mixed message about the proper care and feeding of animals. It isn’t just the barbecue supply aisle, it’s the aisle where everything ends up because it doesn’t logically go with anything else. Yes, it’s mainly filled with cat food, dog food, and enough collars and leashes and fuzzy, squeaky things to keep your pet amused as you play with the toys yourself, but the remaining space is occupied by poison, motor oil, a variety of tape and rope, and (most importantly for Past Me) anything you could possibly need to set something on fire.
I know. I tend to haphazardly change the tense of my verbs, and right now you’re probably thinking that temporal confusion is a maddening subject, aren’t you? Well, let me just say that Present Me—or Future Me if you like that better—has dealt with his fair share of time-space anomalies, so I don’t exactly care if you’re confused by my inconsistencies with time. As I’ve said, my scope of experience with the confusing, tragic, and all things beyond comprehension would make you feel like a grain of sand on a beach, so just go with it. I do.
I found the lighter fluid easily (you know, because of that whole spatial memory Rainman thing I do), and because of that whole I-don’t-have-three-arms thing we humans are known for, and that whole rushing-into-action-without-a-plan thing I do, I fumbled stupidly to keep the lighter burning on the black blob covering my left arm and reach for and open a bottle of lighter fluid with that third arm I don’t have.

Another interesting diversion for those of you who are waiting for me to stop avoiding what’s to come and just get to the big, exploding point of it all, but haven’t stopped reading just yet: I am slightly ambidextrous. I was also born with brain damage, which I have come to believe is just one in a series of unfortunate events that ultimately led to my surviving D-Day. And if you could ask my parents, they would insist that I was born to survive.
I came into the world blue as a Smurf and half-dead. My doctor was an apathetic moron at the mercy of the inferior medical practices of his time. I had to be force-fed because I refused to eat, and I aspirated on the formula.For those of you living in a universe without WebMD, aspiration is a fancy word for choking on something and throwing it up at the same time. And that was just my first day in the world.
Whether as a consequence of the aspiration or because of the hole in my heart, I wasn’t breathing properly either. If not for my father giving me CPR, I wouldn’t be trying against all logic and human physiology to set my own arm on fire, and you certainly wouldn’t be reading about it because I wouldn’t be hunkered down in the middle of the road to Hell writing this right now.
With no oxygen going to my brain, my motor-control center was damaged. That in itself led to several complications that have both haunted me and blessed me in turn all my life.
As I said, I am slightly ambidextrous, but I wouldn’t have gotten that way if the brain damage had not first made me “severely right-handed” (that’s an optimistic way of saying I didn’t use my left hand at all). So my parents trained me to use my left hand by forcing me not to use my right, and here we are.
I suck at pretty much every sport that involves hitting, kicking, catching, or throwing anything (so let’s just say every sport), I take at least twice as long to accomplish something as other people—although that has gotten better over the years—I went through a phase where being in a room with large numbers of people would make me black out and/or have seizures (that and my nascent heart condition are genetic on my father’s side), and of course there are the social awkwardness, OCD, and the impulsive, self-destructive behavior I mentioned before.
I am seriously screwed up, but my parents did everything in their power to make sure I survived and succeeded. The rest is up to me.

So I did the second stupidest thing I could possibly think of because the most stupid thing I could think of at the time was to just stand there, inches away from salvation, with a lit flame to my arm, for the rest of my steadily shortening life.
I shut off the lighter.
With that decision came more agonizing pain as the Plague began working double-time to invade the flesh on my arm, but I focused on the task at hand (no pun intended), pulling a bottle of charcoal lighter fluid from the shelf, the lighter gripped loosely between the bottle and the palm of my hand.
Glad I wouldn’t have to unscrew the cap, I gripped the lighter fluid’s tilt-open nozzle between my teeth and pulled, a hint of pent-up gas fumes puffing their way down my throat.
Coughing, in pain, and getting closer to a life as a professional meat-puppet by the second, I squeezed an entire liter of lighter fluid onto my arm and dropped the empty bottle, being careful not to toss away the small Bic that would ignite my salvation, and struck a flame once more.
They say it isn’t the fuel that ignites first, but the fumes it puts off. And with a whole bottle of lighter fluid dripping down my arm, I’m surprised my body didn’t go up in flames. But as I watched the small flame from my lighter ignite the air above my arm, cascading through the rising fumes like some infernal waterfall, I got the sense that something else was off, although I couldn’t immediately tell what it was.

Then I saw my face, poorly reflected in the half-inch metal cap of the lighter I was holding. That sudden disembodied feeling came again, and I was speeding through my thoughts, each one poking out at my careening consciousness like spokes on the drum of the world’s most intricate music box. No control this time; no invading Plague to give me a purpose, no nemesis to keep me grounded, just my mind getting lost in itself at a million miles an hour.
Just like that, I knew what was off. With the speed and complete absence of control that I was being thrown around my own headspace, I could feel my mental firewall crumbling away, and I could hear a thought coming to me over and over again; a maddening, one-word mantra in a voice I did not recognize as my own: Vaaaaacksssssssss, Vaaaaacksssssssss, Vaaaaacksssssssss. Though it reached me with the pathetic force of a whisper in a hurricane, it had a venomous intensity I could only attribute to the Plague. Even burning to death, it had tried to take advantage of my vulnerable mental state and control my mind.
That familiar feeling of skeletal fingers probing through my thoughts made something click into place in my mind, and I was able to stop the hectic pinball motion of my thoughts, and traverse them confidently like the stacks of a library. Apparently, my spatial memory gift could work inside my head just as well—if not better—than it does in the outside world.
I was also able to use that alien voice and its ethereal, hissing mantra as a strong beacon, which led me to the place where I had heard that cerebral click.
By no coincidence, it was the exact same spot where the Plague had first tried to invade my mind. Floating in the air like a video game power-up (perhaps because my subconscious designed it this way) was a miniature of the music box drum I had pictured earlier. One of the spokes was glowing, pulsing in time with that serpentine chant.
I touched the glowing spoke and felt a sharp pain. A spot of blood formed on my index finger. Apparently, you can also bleed when you’re dreaming…or whatever this was.
Only, it was too dark to be blood. It had the same oily appearance as the Plague puddle that had chased me and was trying through fire and flame to turn me against the world in which I live. As in a nightmare, I could only stand and watch as everything within my field of vision was covered in black. Through the encompassing darkness, I could see ghosts of the world as the Plague meant it to be. I saw myself, shambling through the streets, my lifeless eyes surrounded by rotting flesh, my hands mere twists of bone and frayed muscle. I saw faint suggestions of creatures no man could survive witnessing in their entirety. I saw murder and carnage on a global scale that could not be sated with one planet. I felt the depthless hunger and hatred this being had towards all things Other, especially Others who challenge its power, like I did.
“Albie?” A woman’s voice, calling to me from some far-off place.
With that, my body (if you could call it that right now) started shaking, my head flopping every which way like a dashboard hula dancer, and the pinprick of pain in my finger spread up my arm, growing into a howling agony as the dark world before me erupted in a wall of fire.

[Timedrop23]

IntroSpections #3: Man On the Run

The me you’re currently reading about isn’t yet privy to the weeks of profound reflection and hope-shattering carnage that have made me who I am at the time of this writing.
That version of me just killed his first Decay—twice. He still has Faith Heller on the brain and lacks the guts to tell her so. He still counts being fired for assault and destruction of property as his biggest worry (assuming Past Me survives a zombie-ish apocalypse—but that’s kind of a given, isn’t it? I mean, I’m writing this right now, so I must be the hero, right?). This Albert Wilson of the past has been anything but a hero, and is still finding excuses to escape the man he is meant to become.

I’ve been running all my life, and most of the time I’ve been trying to run from my life. Or at least, a life different from the one I’m comfortable with.
When I say “comfortable,” I don’t necessarily mean I like my life as it is. I just mean that the prospect of anything different scares the hell out of me. It’s why I talk Faith’s ear off about insignificant crap with no thought for whether or not she wants to listen, or God forbid, has something significant of her own to say.
It’s why I throw myself into a mindless rage at the slightest question of my intelligence instead of showing my intelligence by walking away from a conflict. I would rather be respected as “the crazy guy you don’t mess with” than improve myself and let the world be because I know and fear that for all their academic idiocy, these skeptics are socially superior risk-takers who dare to live a better life than I could ever aspire to.
I could give thousands of examples of how I was hard-wired to ruin my life in the face of change, including my current choice to close myself off from the truly terrifying world of infection and mutation that lurks outside these four crumbling walls. But I probably wouldn’t be alone in this mess if I hadn’t alienated my parents and all but ruined a future of my own making.
I wasn’t a perfect student in grade school, but I put everything I had and every bit of help they gave me into becoming the best student I possibly could. And I was a good student. Of course, social awkwardness and a desperate need for approval got in the way, along with my potentially self-destructive time management skills and occasional bouts of depression and defiant laziness that had me frequently putting off assignments I deemed pointless until the last inspiring, flop-sweat-inducing second possible.
As usually happened in those days, I was able to bounce back from ruin (often at the cost of my parents’ sanity) and go on to the next day as if nothing had happened. But that didn’t cut it once I entered college and began working towards a degree in Computer Science.
I chose a local university out of convenience, and the major out of the idealized fantasy in my mind that I would go in, go through the motions as usual, and come out four years later knowing how to code the next Street Fighter all by my lonesome.
From the day I got my first system, I wanted to become a video game programmer—a career choice my successful parents were extremely vocal against. My dad’s a geneticist and Mom is a famous mystery writer who made a fortune from her controversial Getting Away with Murder series. Seeing how versatile a student I was, they each wanted me to follow in their footsteps. I couldn’t escape my creative or scientific roots, but I was fascinated by technology from an early age (and obsessed with video games), so I jumped at the first school to accept me with nary a plan in my head to get me through successfully.
I only knew that I no longer wanted to rely on my parents for their help or reap any of the benefits of their fame and fortune as a way to pay for college, so I applied for several federal and major-specific grants as well as a job at the local grocery store.
My grades began slipping as the novelty of the major quickly wore out and my instructors’ incompetence grew tiresome. When my mother confronted me about my sudden and unexpected academic decline, I insensitively lashed back at her and my father, citing his preoccupation with his work and her constant intrusions on my privacy as excuses for my poor performance. I even accused them of being hindrances to my quest for independence. I had a dorm reserved shortly thereafter, and moved out of their house by the end of the week.
Parents always turn out to be right about one thing or another; having become an independent man, I continued to phone in my academic performance, all the while shopping around for that elusive, attention-grabbing “perfect” major, which led to me quickly accumulating a formidable pile of debt.
People throw the word “irony” around quite a bit, often using it incorrectly in their efforts to appear intelligent in the eyes of others, who are usually no worldlier than themselves. It’s like “you and I” or “literally” or “whatnot.” It’s annoying and lazy and stupid and I tire of hearing it.
True irony isn’t about invincible zombies or stickers on cookie sheets or men who hate dogs. True irony is when you’ve denounced genetics and creative writing and your parents for a life of video games, only to find yourself in the middle of Resident Evil, running from something truly worth fearing, and ultimately winding up back in your parents’ house, where you start writing a book about your life that no one will ever believe happened.
The Universe can be funny that way.

Whether it’s with purpose or not, the fact remains that the Past Me on D-Day is still running from change, and that I still elected to throw myself into immediate danger in the name of getting it all over with.
I dare the Universe to make a joke out of that.
Passing the coffee stand, I noticed Faith was nowhere to be seen. I was worried about her, and I knew I had to search the store for her later, if she was even still in the store. If she’s even still Faith, my mind offered unhelpfully.
I continued my mad dash to the front of the store (once again with no successful plan in mind), noticing with each reflexive glance down an aisle that a Decayed host patrolled the length of every single one, like those ghosts who stalked the mazes in a game of Pac Man. Even if the dozen or so hosts who had just spotted me were as sluggish as the other two, the same could not be said for the Plague that remained in my periphery every time I turned my head.
Already feeling out of breath, I dared to stop just long enough to futilely chuck my frying pan-club at the advancing goo.
Not having to lug around the heavy, cast-iron skillet gave me a second wind and I began to run again, but now I had no weapon.
I glanced to my left, seeing the little lighter display at the rightmost end of the front service counter, and turned to pass between two checkout stands, toppling a magazine rack behind me as I ran.
But that did little to stop the Plague. For the first time in my life, not running would prove to be my biggest mistake. At the display, I reached down, selected a two-pack of Bic lighters from its metal display hook, and opened the packaging. The next thing I knew, something wet and slimy had a hold on my arm. In a state of excruciating pain and suddenly unable to scream, I watched with a humbling species of horror as the Plague began invading the space between the cells of my flesh.
I knew what would happen to me if the goo succeeded; I had seen the results for myself and I knew its rage from the look in the veteran’s eyes, but what I found most disturbing was that the invasion was not merely physical; the Plague had somehow gotten inside my head. The sensation was like an itch in the center of my skull, the feeling of two ancient, bony hands digging through the massive library of my thoughts. With that sensation came an animalistic squeal that I recognized
(created out of my memory?)
as the noise made by the red slugs in Slither, the only zombie comedy film I liked up to that point in my life. These days, not so much.
I soon discovered that if I concentrated on that squeal hard enough—an action I took with the utmost caution because I suspected that psychic focus would work both ways—I could hear the random-yet-structured voice of a hive mind. It was the roar of a bustling flea market crowd gathered with the intention of feasting upon souls and minds and human flesh; not a hive, but a demonic Horde.
As I drew closer and closer to that psychic tipping point, that pinnacle of mental oblivion, I had another out-of-body experience. This wasn’t like before, when my subconscious mind had pointed out my impending embarrassment. As I left my body this time, I could feel a single black eye opening behind my own baby blues, in the same place where those hands of death were still engaged in their neural expedition.

Suddenly, I was looking at myself through the eye of the Horde—the Plague—but also through my own, like a man standing before a tri-fold mirror, staring at a trebled, soulless infinitude of his own image.
I watched as my infinite selves shrank and disappeared into a dark horizon, and I shuddered in fear at the realization represented by that hopeless imagery. If I continued observing myself on a superficial level, as the Horde was no doubt doing, I would fade into nothingness and become yet another of its Decayed instruments.
So rather than escaping outward from my body, I journeyed farther inward, to the epicenter of my mind. There, I immediately understood its nature and purpose for what I had intuitively known it to be all along: a sophisticated supercomputer. The human mind could be programmed; the Plague was right about that much. But it didn’t count on going toe-to-toe with me. In seconds (countless lifetimes to a computer, but more than enough time from my point of view), I had my brain fully firewalled against the mind-controlling goo that was still trying to etch itself into my skin.

I once again had control of my mind and body. But the Plague would not relinquish its hold on my left arm, and that meant I had to fight the overwhelming urge to succumb to the pain and drop the lighter I still clenched tightly in my right hand.
Thinking only of my own survival, I struck a flame and, with agony shredding my nerves, held it to the Plague that now covered my left arm from wrist to elbow.

[Timedrop23]

Apparently, it’s been about a week since I put forth a new character, and I came up with two new Plague villains. One you will have to wait for because it would be a spoiler if I gave it to you now.
Here’s a recap of events so far: Lena Black is off chasing Vlad through the streets of New York, all the while under siege by a horde of vampires. Deus X is occupied with the Hybrid invasion of Atlantis. Frank (with Silver in tow) is leading a small contingent of Clockwork heroes, composed Mad Jack, Lady Icarus, Shield, and Rush, to find a cure for Aaron’s flesh-eating virus. Other heroes are out dealing with as-yet-unspecified Plague attacks, but rest assured that Hi-N’Un and Lady Luck will cross paths with their old foe Robbie Boyle in the near future, and the Vedangan duo of Tetra and Dhanusha (whose journey to the Earth Realm somehow divided them) will encounter more villains from their home dimension, beginning with today’s character, Beelzebub.
I based his likeness on a backwards interpretation of the boar’s head from William Golding’s classic novel, Lord Of the Flies. So as you can probably guess, Beelzebub represents the fourth plague of Egypt: the Plague of Animals/Flies.

Name: Beelzebub
Alias: Lord Of Flies
Race: Ekronian
Birthplace: The Vedanga Dimension
Powers: Flight, Healing factor, Superhuman strength, Power of suggestion (lost since his beheading and revival), Staff of Baal (opens portals to the Dipteran Dimension, a pocket dimension inhabited entirely by giant flies, and gives the wielder command over them).
Bio: Beelzebub was once the ruler of Vedanga, and although a life in the horrific dimension required ruthlessness, Beelzebub was downright monstrous to his subjects, using his power of suggestion to pit them against one another for his amusement. One day, his power was challenged by Tetra and Dhanusha, who soundly defeated the Boar-Lord together, after finding themselves equally matched to one another. He was beheaded publicly and his kingdom divided between the two champions. Tetra claimed Beelzebub’s palace as her own (Dhanusha not wanting the castle for personal reasons), and assisted her co-champion in constructing a second palace for him. The body of Beelzebub was buried in an iron box beneath the foundation of the new palace, and his head was displayed on a pike outside the gates of Tetra’s kingdom as a reminder of their strength.
When the two champions were forced to leave their collapsed kingdoms for the Earth realm, a powerful being appeared in Vedanga, destroying the Saggitarian palace with a wave of his hand. In no time, He recovered the head and body of Beelzebub, and the Boar-Lord was whole again. The being also gifted Beelzebub with the Staff of Baal, a perverted reconstruction of the original Staff of Moses, that would allow the newly crowned Lord Of Flies to unleash His next Plague upon the Earth.

[Timedrop23]

Here’s my crack at the third Plague event villain (not to be confused with the Plague being fought by IntroSpectre and Faith Heller)

Name: Aaron
Race: Human/Demon
Birthplace: Unknown (possibly Egypt)
Powers: Immortality, Control over lice, Giant insect arms.
Bio: The Bible serves as the only account of Aaron’s life as a human, and an incomplete account at best, full of inconsistencies (including at least three versions of his death). His true demise took place after fashioning the Golden Calf at the base of Mount Sinai when God smote him and those gathered before him for worshiping a false idol. Aaron was cast into Hell for his sacrilege, but resurfaced in modern times. His body now serves as host to a giant lice demon, but his will for vengeance against the Pharaoh remains intact (Hi-N’Un’s trickery saved his people from destruction at the hands of Aaron and his brother Moses during the time of the original plagues). Since Aaron’s arrival in our time, outbreaks of a voracious flesh-eating disease have spread across the Earth, forcing Clockwork to further divide its resources in order to deal with the growing number and frequency of Plague attacks.

[Timedrop23]

Appreciate the feedback, Linea24.

To all ‘machiners: I used Hammerknight’s Paint.NET tutorial and had some difficulty assembling the shot with characters on top of one another. The grey pixels around the characters don’t lend to a cohesive-looking picture. Any suggestions on eliminating those pixels would also be greatly appreciated.
To answer any questions about my character-saving process, here it is: I go to widescreen view, right-click, and choose print, then save the image as a pdf. I copy the image from the pdf and paste it into a new photoshop file, then save it as a non-interlaced png because they take up less space than interlaced png’s. [copy and paste Hammerknight’s group shot recipe here as the next step], and done.

Also still accepting thoughts on the Lice character.

[Timedrop23]

Here’s the group shot of Clockwork. I’m still fleshing out the bios for the characters I haven’t done them for yet, but I’ll have the finished copy soon (maybe in the Writers’ Room?).

In other news, I’m fully stuck on the Plague of Lice character. Maybe a guy with bugs crawling out of his beard? There are at least three plagues involving insects, and I don’t just want to do a bunch of bug-men or Swarm-type characters, so ideas are welcome.

I’m also pondering a post-Plagues Clockwork event that will feature an even more all-powerful baddie and an Anti-Clockwork team (think Earth-2 Injustice, but not so far as to get myself in trouble), as well as a post-event Clockwork II team.

[Timedrop23]

Fear not, Timedrop fans! A Clockwork group shot is on the way….

[Timedrop23]

So to complete my Clockwork team, I got a little creative with the inspirations behind my Nine O’ Clock character: the zodiac and the periodic table. If any of you are familiar with either of these, you’ll know that atomic number 9 on the periodic table of the elements is Fluorine, and the ninth sign in the zodiac is Sagittarius. Fluorine is a poisonous, pale yellow gas that, when added to metallic ore, lowers its melting point and thereby makes it easier to use in alloys. It just so happens that the Greek name for Sagittarius is Toxotes, and with Sagittarius being a centaur (an “alloy” of man and horse), it all seemed to fit together nicely. Plus my team didn’t have an archer yet. I also decided to place him in the same dimension as my Four O’Clock character, Tetra. Before I get into the new character, here’s a reminder of Tetra:

Name: Tetra Ka’Li
Alias: Tetra
Race: Ka’Lian
Birthplace: The Vedanga Dimension
Powers: Four arms, Super-strength, High-density skin, Superior jumping ability, Skilled & ruthless fighter.
Bio: The Vedanga Dimension is no place for the average human. It is a land of savage mythical beasts and even more savage beauty. It is a place where demons and gods shed each other’s blood for sport, and what we call magic or fantasy can turn the most harmless of objects into a deadly weapon. It is also where the woman named Tetra Ka’Li grew into a powerful and ruthless warrior-queen whose legend spread even to our world, where our Hindu priests worship her as a goddess of destruction and rebirth. But in the last few days, Tetra has had to single-handedly (so to speak) defend her realm against unprescedented numbers of attacks by skeleton demons, whose very presence on her land has reduced its fields to rot and ruin, and cost the lives of hundreds of her people, who wither and die at the demons’ touch only to rise again and join the growing army of Pestilence.
Tetra recently received word from the Earth realm that the Horseman’s dark influence has reached our planet, that he had been summoned by a being of greater power than himself to wreak havoc upon the Earth. With the help of Dhanusha, the ruler of a nearby Vedangan kingdom, Tetra is able to reach Earth and ally with the Clockwork team against Pestilence and his growing army of darkness.

And with that, we move on to Dhanusha:

Name: Dhanusha
Alias: Sagittarius
Race: Sagittarian
Birthplace: The Vedanga Dimension
Powers: Amalgam Touch (can fuse with or adopt the attributes of any substance or creature by touch), Expert marksmanship with archery weapons (chiefly the crossbow), Alchemy, Skilled and ruthless fighter.
Bio: Another child of the savage Vedanga dimension, Dhanusha clawed and clamored his way to a position of monarchy in a ruthless land, uniting his people against foreign incursion and establishing a shaky alliance with the nearby Ka’Lian empire. But like Ka’Lia, Sagittaria soon fell to Pestillence and his skeleton army, leaving the two champions to stand alone against the horde of ruin incarnate, until an Earth realm priest sent word that Pestillence was no longer in Vedanga. As a master alchemist, Dhanusha was able to open the gateway between Vedanga and Earth, where he and Tetra would align with our planet’s greatest heroes against the Pestillence invasion and whatever higher power had summoned him.

[Timedrop23]

Back to the heroes for this next character. I finally figured out the costume for my Eleven O’ Clock character, settling on a playing card theme while keeping my original thought of a bo-master and incorporating Herr D’s ideas of an insane tech-based hero. I’m always in awe of things I can’t do, and I can’t twirl a bostaff to save my life, so I give you Mad Jack (no relation to the HM artist, and the Jack is the eleventh playing card in a suit, get it?).

Name: Jack Card
Alias: Mad Jack
Race: Human
Birthplace: Reno, Nevada
Powers: Can freeze time, Enhanced strength & reflexes, Control over Knavium, Wields twin Ferro-Knavium staffs.
Bio: Professor Jack Card was once a brilliant scientist, credited with discovering a rare Earth metal he dubbed “Knavium.” As Card would soon learn, Knavium is highly toxic in its purest form. When melded with iron, however, the result is a perfectly safe, nearly indestructible alloy.
Little is known of the effects of exposure to Knavium gas, but his prolonged experimentation with the element left Jack Card horribly disfigured, insane and blind in one eye. Unexpectedly the Knavium poisoning also gifted him with the ability to stop time. This little trick would come in handy later on, as he fought crime under the alias “Mad Jack,” although like himself, the talent would prove to be unpredictable at first, lasting anywhere from a few seconds to a few hours.
Mad Jack’s costume gives him enhanced strength and reflexes, as well as the ability to manipulate any object(s) in his vicinity that contain Knavium.
Mad Jack Card would later enter into a tenuous romance with the exiled princess Prima of Unaria, their relationship constantly tested by his reluctance to let her see his mutilated face, and by her inherent desire for rare metals. Mad Jack eventually joined Clockwork to be closer to Prima, in hopes that they could salvage their failing romance.

[Timedrop23]

IntroSpections #2: Welcome to the Dead Parade

From my blog, “Welcome to the Dead Parade #1: Back From the Dead,” posted April 17, 2006:

This first installment of my own Dead series begins with a nod to Return Of the Living Dead. The inaugural film in this five-installment zombie-athon is absolutely the stupidest a zombie movie can get in terms of quality. The acting and special effects are terrible, even for the 1980s. The severed zombie limbs are yellowish and rubbery, looking more like a necrophiliac’s vibrator collection than actual dead flesh, and every line is delivered in a frenzied one-note scream and accompanied by a Matthew Perry-like windmilling of the arms. But in terms of concept and message, the movie and its first sequel are self-referential comic genius. A high school student is interning at a cadaver supply warehouse, wherein two drums (military property) containing dormant reanimated corpses and the airborne toxin used to create them are stored. The teen and his smart-mouthed mentor accidentally open one of the drums and are immediately under siege by the living dead as they are slowly turned themselves after having inhaled the toxin. The usual “if they bite you, you become one of them” rule applies, but in a funny twist, Return takes place in a “real world” kind of setting where the two main characters have seen Night Of the Living Dead, and they find that severing a zombie’s head doesn’t seem to work like it does in the movies. Apparently, you have to burn this particular brand of zombie to kill it, after which its ashes become the airborne toxin, and then… you get the idea. Even funnier is the idea of giving these zombies the ability to speak; once they have killed a rescue party, the zombies use the CB radio to call for another police car or ambulance as if they are ordering takeout.
In Return Of the Living Dead 2, the crew decides to bring back the cast of the first Return, but put them in a new setting with different relationships. The intelligent, indestructible zombie premise persists, as do the comedy, stupidity, bad acting, and special defects. But again, there is genius hidden in pointlessness as one of the characters expresses a feeling of deja vu; that he has been around these same people, and has been attacked by zombies, before.
The only decent installment across the board is Return Of the Living Dead III. In this second sequel, a couple have decided to run off together, against the wishes of the boy’s military big-wig father. They are run off the road by a military truck carrying…you guessed it: barrels full of indestructible zombies and reanimation gas. The girlfriend dies, but the boy decides to sneak into his father’s research compound and use the toxin to bring her back to life. What follows is part morbid love story, part twisted road movie, and all zombie flick. No bad acting, no bad special effects, and an unbelievably heartfelt ending.
But despite the C-list star power of Peter Coyote, Return IV and V are modern-day violent duds. The zombies have fallen victim to convenience and are now killable by conventional zombie-slaying means. Return IV, a.k.a. Return Of the Living Dead – Necropolis, aims low at being a Resident Evil knockoff, and in a nod to the first two films, ROtLD V – Rave To the Grave recycles the cast and crew of Necropolis. This time around, the toxin gets used as a psychedelic at a Halloween rave party, and the results are brain-dead and stoner-stupid.
Return & Return 2: D+, Return III: B-, Necropolis: C-, Rave: D-

BRRAAAIINS!

I used to love zombie movies, probably more than the average person should.
I’ve downloaded and watched every zombie movie and TV show available in digital format (even the god-awful Return of the Living Dead sequels and conceptual zombie flicks like The Birds and Terminator), I’ve read Stephen King’s Cell roughly ten times since it came out, and I review it all on my blog, which you just experienced for yourselves. It only attracted a few thousand hits in the years between April 2006 and D-Day, but I enjoyed writing it. Perhaps when this is all over, I’ll post my story for the world to see. But since I’m still here and the Decay still shamble through this city’s streets (and God only knows how many others), there’s still a tale to tell, so I might as well get back to telling it.

Here’s another bit of perspective I gained since D-Day: When zombies were just instruments of creative social commentary, I respected the creators of the original Return for hiding a brilliant irony amid an abundance of the moronic. Being a real world human in the face of something zombie-like that can’t be killed in the same manner as a movie zombie, I would have preferred to go on scrubbing toilets and wiping Dr. Pepper-hol off my shoes for the rest of my life.
But we can’t choose what form the proverbial fan-guano will take when it taps us on the shoulder or drops at our feet, so I’m stuck in a living horror movie, getting the kind of firsthand experience every fanboy (including myself) would have given his, uh, first hand for.
Not so much now.
Don’t ask me why a zombie would be tapping me on the shoulder instead of biting my throat, or how it had gotten into the store without raising an alarm because I don’t know (but now that I think about it…). I don’t even know how I did what I did next. Not knowing things sucks, especially when you’re faced with your first zombie attack.
My brain is an amazingly unpredictable thing when I feel threatened. I’m either so focused that my body just reacts to whatever is coming at me and I can deal with it with laser precision, or I lunge blindly at my attacker like a feces-hurling gorilla, only to wind up flat on my back with a person much smaller than myself crushing my crotch beneath his foot.
Let’s just say that if self-defense skills were the primary requirement for a job, my rejection would be immediate and accompanied by a chorus of laughter and pointed fingers, which I would not be privy to enjoy since I would be unconscious by then.
Truly seeing the zombie for the first time (the grey skin that hung loosely around its lifeless eyes and gaping mouth, the yellowish-grey teeth mottled with specks of black, the dark, swollen tongue), I could feel my fight or flight instinct taking over almost instantly. It was like I was shaking from head to toe and frozen stiff all at once, every possible scenario playing through my mind in that ethereal, unfinished way it has of presenting things when I’m trying to think at the speed of light, and then the world disappeared before my eyes in a white-hot glare.
When I came back to myself, the zombie was crumpled to its knees, indicating that I did not just get my butt kicked for the tenth time in my life. Somehow, I had deftly unclipped the handle of my floor mop, broken it in two over my knee, and shoved both pieces into the thing’s eye sockets.
From around the splintered shafts where its lifeless eyes had been, there oozed some unknown oily substance that seemed to move of its own accord, progressing sluggishly at first, but then dividing into several smaller pieces that scattered throughout the store with projectile speed. I kept my distance, just barely hurdling over one of the black pellets. I knew instinctively, even following this, my earliest of encounters with the Decay, that touching the black stuff was a bad idea.

You’ve heard me use words like “Decay” and “D-Day” several times now, and I think it best that you hear from the present me what Past Me is up against here.
It all begins with “the black stuff,” which I call the Plague. The CDC (what’s left of them so soon after the Plague hit the fan), in their understatement of what they have yet to fully comprehend, call it the Hydra Virus.
Whatever you want to call it, the Plague is a symbiotic parasite, a living organism of unknown origin that takes control of its host while consuming it from the inside. Only, at the time that Past Me was opening his first can of Decay-Con, It hadn’t figured out how to perfectly bond with human physiology, so the host’s body tissue would react as if poisoned, aging and atrophying at an accelerated rate until the host was just a walking pile of Decayed flesh with nothing but the Plague in its veins to hold it together.
The Decay have no functioning brain, so not even headshots or decapitation can put them down. What’s worse (as Past Me is about to learn), such trauma only serves to splatter Plague matter everywhere, so the more Plague you shed, the more Decay you have to deal with (which is where the CDC got their stupid code name from—if you don’t know what a Hydra is, bone up on your Greek mythology, dude).
About D-Day: the D stands for Decay, as you can probably guess. For me, the day that the Decay first entered my life was October 10, 2009. For almost every living person I’ve come in contact with, the date of D-Day has been different. We even suspect (and fear) that the true D-Day was farther in our pasts than any of us dares to think. But to reveal any more at this point would spoil what you are about to read, so let’s see what D-Day has in store for Past Me.

The Decay I had just dropped wore a faded blue denim vest over a black tee shirt boasting the slogan, “I’ll have whatever kind of day I damned well feel like!” His clothes and a floppy green VFW cap that had been pushed askew in the fall were the only indications that this zombie-like thing was once human (and apparently, said human wasn’t too fond of customer service personnel).
A Decayed host has no mind of its own, as Present Albert has already told you, but before Past Me whited out and turned the undead veteran’s eyes into ruptured sacs of Plague jelly, I could swear I saw something in them that was less mindless hunger than a mixture of fearless hatred and malevolent intelligence.
To my mounting horror, the not-zombie reached blindly up to the two splintered shafts protruding from its face where its eyes had been and yanked them free.
As the sightless, undead thing staggered to its feet to pursue me, I looked around desperately for some kind of weapon. From the corner of my eye, I spotted a large frying pan hanging in the cookware section near the ironically packaged baking sheets, grabbed it with one groping hand, and swung at the thing’s deformed skull with all my force like a demented tennis player.
BONGGG!
I landed a direct blow to the side of its face. The impact rippled through its flapping, ashen flesh, sending bits of blackened brain matter, yellowed cranium and decayed teeth flying through the air, and splattering the frosting section with more of that seemingly sentient black goo.
I stood at the ready, feet spread with a two-handed grip on the frying pan, just in case two punctured eyes and a caved-in skull proved not to be overkill enough for the veteran-thing laying at my feet.
From the corner of my eye, I saw the goo starting to twitch and ripple on a can of peppermint frosting just inches from my head, and decided I would be better off getting the hell out of there. I hurdled over the body of the Decay I had twice killed, being careful not to make physical contact with it or any of the Plague pouring from the side of its head.
I made it to the end of the aisle before almost crashing headlong into another Decayed host. The man it had been was so comically dressed I almost didn’t register the danger until it was too late. Blocking my path was a tall, gangly white guy (but how can you tell with all the life and color sucked out of his skin?) dressed in a Rastafarian stocking cap, lime green leggings and shirt, and baggy neon orange shorts and sneakers. I could see that the Plague infection had caused half of Mr. DayGlo’s dreadlocks to fall off, taking the flesh from the right side of his skull with it, all the way to the bone. With no lid tissue to hold it in, his right eye hung by a blackened optic nerve, swinging lazily across his exposed cheekbone.
Sufficiently terrified and disgusted, I reversed direction, narrowly escaping Mr. DayGlo’s grasp, only to see that the splattered goo had begun to drip down to the floor and join with the puddle forming at the side of Mr. VFW’s shattered skull, and I knew I was screwed.
If I tried to jump Mr. VFW’s corpse for a second time, the Plague mass would most likely grab me and that would be the end. On the other hand, if there was one host shambling around in here, there were sure to be more, and if I took a wrong turn one of them would grab me and the Plague would have me anyway.
I can wait patiently for a long time if I need to, but where bad news is concerned, I prefer to get it over with whether that turns out to be a good decision on my part or not.
So I thought, Screw it, leaped over the gathering Plague-puddle, and ran like hell.

[Timedrop23]

Timedrop23: This is what happens when I don’t think, folks. I numbered the friggin’ topic instead of just calling the whole thread “Introspections” and numbering my replies as chapters. Can a mod fix this for me or am I stuck with it?
Whatever the case, back to another Introspection by the IntroSpectre himself, Albert Wilson…

[Timedrop23]

I think I finally got the menace on this guy right (admittedly Vlad looks a bit goofy but I’m just going for concepts at this point). What started as a rogues’ gallery for the Pharaoh alone has become something of an anti-Clockwork syndicate composed of villains who have (for lack of a less spoiler-y word) “plagued” one or more of Clockwork’s heroes and/or other heroes in the Timedrop Comics Universe. This group will be based, as I originally intended when Hi-N’Un was the chief protagonist, upon the ten biblical plagues of Egypt. Vlad the Impaler and his fearsome Sword of Tepes obviously embodied the plague of Blood. Now I give you a more subordinate character, based on the plague of Frogs.

Name: Unknown
Alias: The Human Frog
Race: Hybrid
Birthplace: Atlantis
Powers: Breathes underwater, Superhuman strength, agility, and jumping ability, Heightened senses, Immunity from amphibian-based toxins, Frog-like tongue, Psychic communication with Hybrids (similar to sonar).
Bio: Little is known about the origins of the Human Frog. He is one of dozens of Hybridized Atlanteans created by the Gauntlets’ DNA-altering side-effects, and one of the rare few who retain some small vestige of a civilized personality. It is unknown whether he engineered the Hybrids’ escape or was an escapee himself, but the Human Frog’s slightly advanced brain has allowed him to properly organize the Hybrid refugees into a kind of guerrilla army that he has led in several raids against the fabled sunken city. The latest (and largest Hybrid raid to date) caught the attention of the technologically omniscient surface-dweller known as Deus X. In Atlantis at the behest of his colleague and girlfriend, the infernal Ambassador Icthya, Deus X left his own world vulnerable to attack to aid in suppressing the Atlantean conflict…all according to plan?

[Timedrop23]

A second villain submission for you. I finally got the kinks ironed out on the first member of Hi-N’Un XII’s rogues’ gallery (too’many’apostrophes”””’!), and now I present you with the man responsible for New York’s recent vampirism problem.

Name: Vlad III Dracula
Alias: Count Dracula, Vlad Tepes, Vlad the Impaler, King of the Vampires (self-appointed)
Race: Vampire
Birthplace: Sighișoara, Transylvania, Kingdom of Hungary (now Romania)
Powers: Immortality, Mesmerism, Vampirism, Flight, Inhuman strength
Bio: Dracula’s factual bio can be found here, but where history claims Vlad the Impaler died in the late 1470’s AD, assassinated under mysterious circumstances, in truth the former Transylvanian nobleman went into hiding, aware from his practice in the dark arts that forces beyond his domain were planning to end his reign and his life. Vlad’s forays into dark magic later led him to a ritual that would allow him life everlasting, provided he drank human blood on a regular basis. But as any who toy with the black arts can tell you, there are always strings attached. The ritual not only infused Dracula with the blood of life eternal, but also made him host to a demonic virus known at the time as Tepes Croatoa, which warped his body and soul, turning him into the most powerful and feared vampire in history.
During her travels to post-Dark Ages Europe, Tempora Doce often crossed paths with the infamous count, and though she escaped his clutches, none of their encounters could rightly be called a victory.
Vlad has since defeated and killed several members of the cursed Black family, including Lena’s mother Leonore, while living as a zoologist under the name Daniel Basara. Most recently, he has come into possession of the lost Sword of Tepes, a fearsome demonic weapon capable of transmuting water into vampiric blood. Is the outbreak in Ithaca, New York (now statewide and spreading) strictly Vlad’s doing, or is there a greater plan at work?

[Timedrop23]

Here’s my Ten O’Clock hero as promised, the all-seeing Deus X.

Name: Juto Abanme
Alias: Deus X
Race: Human
Birthplace: Tokyo, Japan
Powers (from Deus X suit): Flight, Access to every piece of electronic information on Earth (or any habitable planet he visits), Can translate any Earth language, as well as Unarian, Moord’rian, and Atlantean, into any other available language, Enhanced strength.
Bio: Juto Abanme was a highly gifted software engineer recruited as a replacement for the deposed Dr. Elizabeth Stein at HallowGen. In a few short months, Abanme helped re-engineer (and in many cases, improve upon) all of the tech stolen by Dr. Stein, even using her data transfer technology in conjunction with spare P.A.T.C.H. parts and a modification of his own UAP (Universal Access Protocol) interface to create the ultimate in omniscient data access gear, the Deus X suit.
Frank’s last encounter with the B.R.I.D.E. forced Abanme to don the suit, becoming Deus X for the first time. He ultimately reversed the information flow from his suit into the B.R.I.D.E., causing her to overload and crash.
Abanme has since been appointed as head of security (both digital and physical) at HallowGen, and most recently joined Clockwork as the team’s chief information analyst. He also serves as liason to the Unarian and Atlantean peoples, and has developed a close personal and professional relationship with Atlantean Ambassador Icthya, frequently providing assistance with events arising from the hybrid conspiracy.

Note: Ju and To are Japanese words for the cardinal number ten, while Jubanme is the ordinal expression, tenth.

[Timedrop23]

@Herr D said:

For 9 you’ve got cat motifs or someone who uses a cat-of-nine-tails. (No close-quarter fighting for that, obviously.) For 11, you could explore insanity–one short of a dozen, hacker (binary for 3, when abandoned or family killed, etc.)

Of course, you might explore them as a pair . . . 9 / 11 terrorist fighters?

@HerrD: Thanks for the prompt reply. I like the cat-of-nine-tails idea, and a hacker backstory would fit in nicely with this tech-based bo-master I’ve been pondering.

Also to all ‘Machiners out there, I have just posted the first chapter of my Faith Heller story (the beginnings of which are a series called “Introspections”) in the Writers’ Room. Enjoy.

[Author]

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