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The Cape and The Mask

April, 2019

0802 (8:02 AM St. Louis civilian time)

“Am I gonna die?”

Rusty clung to his father, Oliver, like leaves hang on a branch.

He sniffed.

Oliver tried rocking back and forth a little. The motion seemed to calm Rusty down a little.

“Don’t be silly. By tonight you’ll forget that you had a cold.”

“Are you sure. I’m gonna die.”

Rusty sniffed again.

“Munchkin, if everyone died whenever they felt bad, there wouldn’t be anyone alive.”

Rusty pushed his head against his father’s neck. Rusty’s forehead felt clammy and feverish.  

“Stowy time now?”

Oliver hesitated. He had work in an hour.  Traffic was bad– it always was– and, unlike some people in the house, he didn’t have wings.  Well, just Hunter.  Rusty looked completely like a normal 3-year-old human.  Hunter tried explaining that a few times but used an hour worth of weird, made-up phrases like “forced cellular restructuring.”  Oliver was a fighter, but his eyes glazed when he heard “anthromorphic simulcrum” followed by strings of six-syllable words he couldn’t repeat.  Eventually Hunter compared it to the Terminator that made himself look like a human.  It took them an hour to struggle to a twenty-second solution– that’s government work for you.  

“Sure, a short story.”

“The spaceship stowy?”

“Not short enough. How about the one about capes and masks?”  Hunter’s explanation of the origin of human superheroes and fashion genuinely interested him.  The whole story was insanely long, though.  It was part of a vast story  that he compared to a encylopedia-length version of the Marine Hymn.  Supposedly every dragon that mattered memorized it.  

“OK.” Rusty’s head nodded slightly into Oliver’s chin– it felt like his son hadn’t slept soundly last night. 

“Long ago, the civilized regions of a planet far, far away– the planet where Uncle Hunter was born– were manned by an advanced race of Creators and their dragon servants. The Creators were fragile and unique…”

“Like a snowflake!” 

“Mmm, very good.  The dragons were hard and virtually identical.”  Rusty was clearly thinking of another good comparison.  

“Like death,” I said.  That one actually came straight from Hunter.  “They had each been designed as worthy servants, and one what made one servant worthy of one master—loyalty, selflessness, competence—made him worthy of any other.”

Every other time Oliver had told this story, Rusty had interjected here that it wasn’t ‘nice’ that a species had been created to serve. Rusty’s indignation was endearing in a way, although well besides the point. In any case, Rusty was now silent. He must have been pretty sick, Oliver thought.  

“Over some time, the Creators began to get really sick with a bad illness, one even worse than the one you have.  Every cure failed.  The Creators withered and perished, but no dragons got sick.”  

“The Creator John–” Oliver had forgotten what Hunter had called him… it had a lot of slithery sounds.  “–himself sick with the plague, called his five dragons before him. He was almost dead and his civilization was on the verge of annihilation.”

Rusty murmured something.

“Annihilation means destruction.”

Rusty nodded into his chin again.

“John reprogrammed his dragons to create a new civilization.  He unlocked special traits within each. But he knew that a civilization of servants could not last without instructions, and so he gave them a final set of commands so that they could learn to serve each other forever.”  

“The first dragon accepted his assignment to break the land and bend it to the will of the whole. To complete his task he was blessed with uncanny empathy and patience. He prepared his Lifebenders to act as the community’s farmers and engineers.”  He told Hunter that that name sounded pretty stupid.  Hunter thanked him for his input and gave him a look that said go jump off a bridge.  

“The second dragon accepted his assignment to make everyone smarter and find better ways to do things. To complete his task he got relentlessness and curiosity. He prepared his Seers to act as the community’s artists and eggheads.  Err… intellectuals.”  At least that career title wouldn’t make anyone laugh.  

“The third dragon accepted his assignment to make more of the world safe.  To complete his task he was given uncommon selflessness and ferocity. He prepared his Reavers to destroy the community’s enemies, the terrasques and mind flayers, wherever they were found.”  Ryan suggested calling these guys just soldiers, but Hunter looked even more upset.  So ‘Reavers’ it was.  

“The fourth and fifth dragons had already proven themselves very obedient and loyal.  They were assigned the task of keeping everyone working together by finding out what everyone wanted done and making sure it got done.   The fourth accepted and was made very diplomatic and friendly.  The fifth, Bahamut, refused.”  Bahamut actually was the name Hunter used.  Ryan remembered it because he thought of a Chihuahua, namely, a ‘Baja mutt.’  Given the deferential tone Hunter took on when speaking of Mr. Bahamut– he closed his eyes when saying his name– Ryan didn’t it feel wise to bring that up, though. 

“Bahamut said ‘Father, I was created to be the perfect servant. I’ve always acted as the guardian of your interests at the peril of your displeasure. You have ordered me to do things that might be desirable but harmful to the community.  That is as much an attack on me as ordering a Lifebender to butcher plants, a Seer to give up the search for truth, or a Reaver to ignore our predators where he finds them.”  Hunter admitted that he actually took a lot of that language from the Federalist Papers, go figure.  So Ryan felt uncomfortable editing that out. 

“The other dragons, who had grown jealous hearing how loyal he was, got really nasty with him now.  Even John was upset– he was so sick that he had no mind for disagreement.  Every other dragon said that Bahamut wasn’t right, that he couldn’t be absolutely sure how to secure the common good.”  

“Bahamut couldn’t prove that he was the wisest or smartest. But he stated that he acted with honor and integrity, which he did.  Not even they thought otherwise.”  

“Finally John asked him how he could be so sure he’d remain pure and committed to the community, even though he’d be acting of his own will on their behalf.  Bahamut said that his independence would actually improve his integrity by making it less tempting to do what is popular instead of what is right.”

“Then John let Bahamut prepare his Guardians to preserve the community from any threat to its wellbeing.  But John made Bahamut wear his cape, which looked pretty silly on a guy with wings.”  From Ryan’s wingless perspective, they looked pretty ridiculous on everyone.  But green berets looked pretty ridiculous, too– Army Special Forces put those on to look different.

“He also made Bahamut mask his face all the time, to remind everyone that a Guardian was always on his own and should not look like other dragons.  Finally, Bahamut was blessed with firebreath, a power that could be used for tremendous good, destruction, or both.”  Hunter suggested that Bahamut’s descendants actually got different superpowers besides fire-breath.  When Oliver asked what Hunter’s was, he said that he was ‘really good at filling coffins.’  He wouldn’t elaborate.       

“Bahamut accepted his commission with these words, the last said to Thanethope before his death. ‘By your command.’”

Rusty didn’t say anything.  Oliver wasn’t sure how long he had been asleep.

“Christ, the fifteen-minute version of your creation story knocked you out.  Your vote of confidence in your species and my story-telling ability is overwhelming, munchkin.”  If Oliver had to memorize around a straight week of these oral histories– 200 hours of straight talking–like Hunter had had to, he’d have jumped on the nearest spaceship, too.  

END CHAPTER

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If you have any questions or concerns about the chapter or the work as a whole, please leave me a comment. I’d particularly like to know if something is confusing or unclear. Thanks.

Now then. Before tonight, I had planned to make Chapter 1 an account of Rahul trying and failing to study. I’ve since decided that I hate Rahul and he may be taken out of the story entirely.

The main, overriding problem I had with Rahul was that I don’t know India well enough to make anything I write about an Indian believable. Everything about him– how an Indian might plausibly interact with his family, what he might say, what he might see or hear in a given day, what his government might do or think– was something very difficult for me to puzzle through. I could (and did) get a lot of help from Indians living in the US on this, but I feel like the best I could have done was parroting what they said. Working with an American setting, I can wildly spin vitality and my own dangerous vision into whatever I like and no one can claim that “That McKenzie fellow obviously knows nothing about America. He is completely off-base and a racist.” Whenever I tried to write a chapter set in India, I found myself censoring my writing way too much. “No, that probably doesn’t sound real enough.” At least when writing about the US, I understand when I’m venturing into the realm of fantasy and implausibility (this is about superheroes, after all).

I think that it would be far easier for me to stick to what I have an intimate knowledge of. American political theory buffs might recognize some parallels between Bahamut’s story and the Federalist Papers. In Federalist 79, Hamilton says “it is the duty of those appointed to be the guardians of [the public] interest… to serve the people at the peril of their displeasure.” I like that line very much, and Bahamut quotes it pretty much verbatim. I’d be disappointed, though, if only political scientists could enjoy my work. I hope to argue about power and virtue in a work accessible to pretty much anyone that likes superheroes and combat.

One motif of superheroes is the cape and mask. Masks might make sense because they can hide your identity. Capes make no sense whatsoever– they’d get caught on everything (especially flapping wings) and they’d build air resistance. I interpreted both capes and masks as part of an effort not to hide a hero’s identity, but to create one distinct from the rest of society.