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**I’m not sure where this will fit in, if at all, to the rest of the story.  I might break up the information and spread it into other chapters.**

I like Lash a lot.  He reminds me of a young Captain Carnage– earnest, idealistic,  and completely out of his depth power-wise.  The Social Justice League will reassign Lash to the East Coast in around five years, where he will die easily and gloriously.  Forget about New York– he wouldn’t last a night in the Capetowns of Boston or Philadelphia.  Even if he miraculously survives, which he won’t, he won’t ever advance within the SJL’s ranks.  It’s more cliquish and less open to the power-less than the Office of Special Investigations.   Individuals that demonstrate a savagely strong spirit defending the people can be blessed with a body to match.  I hope you’ve heard of a dragon’s blessing?  Yes, I can make people “super,” but just on a physical level.  If they aren’t astonishingly strong spiritually, the spirits will end the person’s life in an unbelievably gruesome way.

Lash impresses me on a third level.  He has a good eye.  He strikes me as very shrewd, which is a trait particularly lacking among most would-be superheroes.   He asked for any advice I might give to keep him alive.  Most would-bes don’t seem to know that they are putting their lives in Bahamut’s claws by putting on a cape.  Those that do realize the danger try to be stoic and silent, which is not very productive, compared tothinking about ways of maximizing their combat effectiveness.

As luck would have it, I needed a SJL cover around the same time that he approached me.  I told him that I would be willing to wear his colors.   Having two people each wearing the same costume makes it harder for enemies to pin the cape to a squishy family-man.   More important, he needed credibility.  To be seen as someone who could make and keep order in Capetown.  I’m hardly the strongest, maturest, or fastest fighter on Earth– but my claws are sharp, eyes are steady, and mind is open.   I even got pretty good with Lash’s whips, even though I made mine by taking away muscle mass elsewhere.

“Why couldn’t you get an Social Justice League cover of your own, officially?”

It’s a long story.  The short answer is that I’m military.  And old.  I remember when Gigas used to say “peace, rightness, and the American way” and mean it.  This job– the constant violence, losing loved ones, fighting against those who should be on your side but aren’t– it leads almost inevitably to bitterness, cynicism and eventually paranoia and a profound disdain for society.   This is a global phoenomeon, but especially pronounced among American heroes.  A hero first manifests his moral peril by wisecracking incessantly and then starts joking about death and other unseemly topics.  He may act immature, completely unserious,  or anti-social.  No doubt you’ve noticed how many heroes wear in black and mutter darkly to themselves.  These are all common stress-coping mechanisms.

Gigas’ fall saddens me.  He has very expensive habits and has grown accustomed to a luxurious lifestyle.  He’s only a newspaper journalist, though, which leaves him with his super-identity to satisfy his desires.  His comic books sell extremely well abroad and distressingly well here too.   What disturbs me the most is that I do not believe for a moment that he believes what he is selling.  He was there when we took the fight to Germany and hammered Japan.  He was even a fairly dedicated anti-Communist until Vietnam.  I just cannot believe that that shining beacon of democracy and human dignity really believes that Dresden and September 11 are morally equivalent.  It sells well, though.

I do not like him very much.  He is an alien, like me, that grew up in the Midwest, like me.  Unlike me, he looks exactly like a human, which gave him an opportunity to abuse his special abilities.  He was an all-American in four sports, probably because he could benchpress a train at 16.  I assumed then that he didn’t know he was an alien and that he was simply unaware of his unfair advantages in a competition meant for humans.  Now I know that he was so fast and powerful that he must have consciously underplayed to deceive his audience.

He went to college on a football scholarship.  He was well on the way to winning a Heisman Trophy.

Dr. Fox gave him a blank stare.

That’s the top award for college football.  It’s very special–  it is a sign that a person has put a surreal effort into his football duties.  Far beyond the 40-50 hours of physical activity most starting players do.  Perhaps you can see why such an award means so much to me.  It is proof positive of a spiritual victory over pain, weakness, and despair.  I explained to a young Gigas that the award would be meaningless to him– he hadn’t put the slightest amount of effort into his performance.  He laughed at me.  I told him that he would fake a career-ending injury or I would give him one.

Even then he was an extremely powerful force.  But he was restrained by his desire to keep the secret of his success hidden.  He agreed to leave football, but never forgave me for it.

He graduated with highest honors– not that hard, when you read five books a minute and don’t need to sleep.  He graduated from journalism school and started working with the Globe.  That provided a handy cover to cover World War II, in which he was not an insignificant participant.  Gigas is, admittedly, a big story. He has shamelessly used his cape to advance his journalism career.  He has used his career in journalism to get the most ludicrously favorable press coverage imaginable.  He married a Pulitzer-winner, too.  If you can believe it, he coined the term “superhero” describing himself.   If I have EVER called someone a superhero, it is only because they have taken on a duty far greater than their body was designed for.   Not because they put on a cape, not because they can kick a trailer into deep-space, but because they endanger themselves for something greater than themselves.  Lash McMaster, virtually any soldier, but not– if there is any justice on the Earth– not Gigas.  I’m not making any statement of American policy, now, but I would not be disappointed if the President ordered me to execute him.  Not at all.

The ironic thing is that, because of the slanders he and his media flunkies have spread for decades, I am now believed to be a vicious and insatiably bloodthirsty monster by significant portions of the American people.  I’ve been accused of murders that took place over 6000 miles from where I was filmed battling a nethercreep.  I’m not shy with my blades– I kill as ordered– but I think that I am not particularly vicious.  I was so reluctant to use force unordered that I actually received a “recruiter” to keep other Marines from picking one-sided fights with me.  That even a single American thinks highly of me now is, I think, an astonishing testament to the people.

This grim saga could only end two ways.  One, the journalists win and the President fires me.  My guiding spirits will see such a disassociation with the government  as proof that I have failed massively in my duty to protect the Constitution and people of the United States.  That is a capital crime.  Two, I defeat Gigas.   Although it would be satisfying to kill him, even if I could, I shudder to think of a United States where libel–which is ultimately what this comes back to– is a capital crime.  A more right and honorable victory would be the unceremonious removal of his statue from the Hall of Heroes.  We could easily name any of a thousand more suitable replacements.  It would be more satisfying if we left that space blank as a warning to those who build an idol to nothing.

It has been said that “Journalists write the first draft of history.”  Perhaps.  I hope for posterity’s sake that history has a good editor.

Ryan was staring intently at the security monitors, looking for a threat that wasn’t there.  Right now, he clarified to himself.  There might have been more security than the project needed, but he hadn’t been fired yet.  It was still his job to watch and wait.   Word had it that Security actually got off the emergency budget cuts pretty light, even though everyone had lost a lot of hours and there was much griping about (temporary) pay-cuts.  He didn’t know what everyone was complaining about.  Pemetex still paid far more and demanded far less than the Marine Corps.   He wasn’t sure what South Africa or Belgium, say, paid their soldiers, but the foreigners probably increased their wages even more at Pemetex than he did.   The downside, of course, was that he worked with a lot of foreigners whose main military experience was maintaining apartheid or apologizing for their existence.  Once a Marine, he thought…

His phone rang.  He picked it up and said only “Hello.”

“Oliver, is that you?”  The voice sounded like he might have heard it before.

He gave a non-committal response, “Who is this?”  He wasn’t sure who was calling, or why, and giving away anything before knowing at least that much was not safe.

“Jim.  Jim Brannigan, from the Army.”  He didn’t add “you do remember me, right?” but his tone indicated that he was thinking it.

“This is Oliver.  What’s it been, eight years?” He was pretty sure he had worked with him in Iraq or Afghanistan, not Iran or Somalia, but the hell-torn sandpits blurred together after a while.

“Five,” he said with a bit of sourness in his voice.  “We did patrols in Isfahan.  Iran, remember?”

Isfahan… Isfahan… he strained to think about what he had done and who he had seen there.  Every recruiter did some ground patrols, to maintain a cover and learn what their caped partners and regular soldiers did.  It was probably a good thing, too… no one became a Marine to put “recruiter” on their business card, even though it meant working with interesting (and often deranged) individuals that exposed themselves to far more power and stress than anyone was meant to have.  His tasks ranged from deadly serious (helping a caped Level 0 overcome a Level 3 capekiller), to  strange (obtaining three tons of eucalyptus for a Martian birthday celebration), to downright bizarre (explaining football to an alien whose only idea of sport was giving prey ten seconds to run).   It took a lot of painstaking work to avoid the problems that would otherwise arise from having super-powered individuals (and aliens, especially) in an otherwise conventional military.

“Yeah, I think I remember being in Isfahan.”

“Definitely.  I remember seeing you because it was right after the Blue Persian decimated the east side of the town.”

“That definitely rings a bell.”  That attack precipitated a hunter-killer response.  Two days, one body.  It wasn’t the most distinguished point of his service, but it mattered enough to the survivors of Isfahan.

“Are you still in the Marines?”

“Retired, three years ago.”   He didn’t feel he needed to elaborate further– he hardly knew Brannigan, and everyone thought recruiters were whiners anyway.   Anything short of a full explanation would definitely sound like whining, and there was no damned way that anyone but a Marine would get the whole story first.  The Army grunt didn’t deserve the full truth, but he also deserved betetr than the standard b.s. leg injury story he told to explain the apparent end of his three decades of military service.

“How’s the Army working out?”

“They kicked me out after I lost a leg to an IED.  It’s too bad… I had at least another tour in me, maybe two.  The prosthetic works pretty good and the ladies go wild for it.”

“Amen.”

Oliver’s supervisor walked past.  “I’m sorry to cut this short, Mike, but I’m at work now.  I’m going to have to let you go.”

“Sorry, but this will just take a moment.  I work at a place that puts foreign students up with host families.  I was wondering if you’d be interested.”

The abruptness of Mike’s change caught Oliver.  He didn’t think that he had ever received such a roundabout sales pitch.  He didn’t want to waste Mike’s time, but it wasn’t his fault Mike beat around the bush.

Although his house was big enough for a student, he already had a guest (a goddamn alien living in the guest bedroom).  Then there was Rusty.  He liked strangers well enough, but living with one might give him some crazy ideas about what was expected of a gentleman and officer-in-training.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think I’d be interested.”

Oliver expected him to make another pitch.  Salesmen never gave up.  But he didn’t say anything for a while.

“Please, Oliver.  You don’t know how much this means to me.”  He sounded pretty desperate, almost like he was about to cry.  His tone was an astonishing admission of weakness, what with the Marines-Army rivalry.  Oliver knew of a few soldiers that hadn’t adjusted well to civilian life, but going to pieces over a missed sale was a sign that something was seriously wrong.

“Alright, I’ll do it, but…”  He looked around with nervous eyes and dropped his voice conspiratorially.  “…you had better not give me some Eurotrash.  I’m already up to my eyes in them here.  And… you’d get help if you needed it, right?”

*********

The entire conversation had left a bad taste in his mouth.   Brannigan had sounded far more cheerful after Oliver agreed to host a student.  The difference was so remarkable that Oliver decided he had been expertly conned.

Another problem was that his cover may have been blown.  Brannigan somehow got his name and phone number, and he certainly hadn’t given them out loosely.  It was possible that Brannigan had just noticed his name off a list of prospects (victims).  But it seemed that he remembered him too well for a passing acquaintance.  People tend to remember the impressive and strange… Jim probably remembered Oliver because he knew that he was a recruiter.   At least, Oliver mused, Jim wasn’t a scheming supervillain plotting his excruciating demise.  Christ, he was in the Army.

He tried thinking more about it as he drove home that night but couldn’t get much further.  There was this nagging feeling that there was something he was missing.  He found himself snapping his fingers as he drove back, thinking of details that might help.  Nothing.

He missed two exits and got caught in massive traffic.  His radio helpfully explained that the traffic was caused by damage to an overpass done in an attempted bank robbery.  The radio didn’t have to mention that the robbers wore masks.  Seriously, who else would blow up a street robbing a bank?  Damn amateurs.    It was unfortunately an open secret that St. Louis was pretty much free for the taking during daylight hours.  Only a plastic surgeon who worked long hours and an extraterrestrial dragon with a pathological disdain for sunlighthad tried to rule the streets.  Well, others had tried, but those two survived.

Whatever else he had wanted to do today, straddling on a flagpole hundreds of feet above certain death was not high on Fox’s list. Rusty wasn’t taking it particularly well, either, but at least he didn’t know how screwed they were.

Fox reached into his shorts pocket. Maybe he could call the fire department– it struck him as plausible that they had cranes that reached even fifty stories up, to handle fires that might start this high. If he could last that long, of course.

He couldn’t bring himself to look at his pocket– he felt grimly certain that he would throw up if he looked down. In the moment that he drew out his cell phone, Rusty cried a little bit harder and maybe the wind was a bit harder, a bit colder, and a bit wilder. Whatever the causes were, the effect was that he overbalanced and grabbed the pole with his right hand to counterbalance. The phone slipped out of his hands and he realized that his knees were also clenched against the pole. They turned a disturbing shade of lavender instead of a healthy violet.

He looked up at the sky, mocking him with the last rays of a dying sun on a clear day. He counted out the 4.89 seconds he estimated it would take for a cellphone to plummet 48 stories, if each story averaged eight feet. His body’s air resistance might have differed from the cell phone’s, but he assumed that it– and the resulting terminal velocity– would be pretty close. He didn’t hear the phone splatter against the pavement, and he certainly wasn’t looking, but maybe some random passerby would see what happened and assume that someone was trapped on the flagpole.

He felt more optimistic that someone in the building across might see him and call for help. This was also, he realized, something of a fantasy. The odds that someone would look out and actually get help to arrive in time were quickly approaching zero. Someone without a background in calculus would say that they had already reached zero, so at least he had that going for him.

Out of the blue there was a crash of thunder, one that rang in his ears. He had to look up to believe it; the sky had been wonderfully clear only a minute or two before. Rusty started crying again, and he couldn’t even bring himself to try to cheer him up. He had no idea how much longer his knees could hold on after the rain slicked the pole. Five minutes didn’t seem too much to hope for… after counting to sixty, even two more minutes seemed undoable.

He cracked and looked down. He saw an awful blur of cars and headlights, people milling about on the sidewalk, surely unaware that a man-sized body was about to fall on top of them. There was definitely no one coming. He wasn’t sure if this was the first time today he knew he was going to die here, but he was sure that it was the first time today he wept.

There was a slight tapping on his shoulder. His mind, working far faster than he wanted it to now, told him that it was probably hail. What else could touch his shoulders when his back was against a skyscraper’s wall? His head, caught in a moment of wholly unprobable hope, turned upwards. He caught a glimpse of a masked face, upside down, only inches away from his own. The shock of seeing someone– so close– nearly caused him to tip over. This–and Rusty, and the rain, and the lost phone– was too much.

“Sup, I’m Lash. I’m climbing down from the antenna on a whip but I’m six feet or so short of the flagpole. Move five feet forward and I can jump on the pole. ”

“Then what?” Fox’s voice was angry. He obviously wasn’t doing well.

“Let’s see if I make it. If I play myself jumping, then I don’t have to worry about an exit strategy.”

After a few seconds of silence, Catastrophe felt a loud thud behind him.

“Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about, bitches. Aiight, I have another whip. I’ll tie the two together, you pass me the kid, and we climb to the roof.”

“How do I know you’re not one of them? You might push me off as soon as I do.”

“Brother, I just leapt six feet on to a flagpole to save your sorry self. Well, the kid, mostly. I deserve the benefit of the doubt.

Rusty spoke up. “Uncle Cat, I wanna go with him.”

“Fair enough. You’re behind me and the pole’s too slippery to turn around. How do I pass him to you?”

“Hold him in your lap. I’ll come up right behind you. I will reach over your arms and lift the kid over you. Then we’ll climb up the ropes and take the elevators down.”

“There’s no way.” His quiet resignation had at least made it a bit easier to reach for the kid. Rusty was soaked by the rain, so every bit of help was a godsend. Fox’s right ear flicked a bit in the wind and nearly caught Lash’s arm as it was lifting Rusty clear. The kid clearly got a lot more cheerful when he was resting in Lash’s arms. Still scared, but hopeful.

“Hey champ. What’s your name?”

“I’m Rusty!”

Rusty stole a glance at the ground. Lash tried calming him down by asking a few questions about his favorite sports team. Keeping him talking would reduce the risk of shock.

“And you, purple buddy. You got a name?”

“James Fox, Dr. James Fox.” “My friends call me Catastrophe,” he added.

“Got a favorite sports team?”

“You’re going to have to try a lot harder than that to calm me down. I know I’m not making it down alive… there’s no way I could climb 25 feet up a robe, even if it had knots. That, and I wouldn’t actually be facing the wall when I was climbing.”

From what Lash could see, Catastrophe was a bit scrawny and his arms were shaking far too much to even think about climbing in the rain.

“Got a favorite superhero?” He quickly added “I’m not playing at making you feel better. If you know anyone who can fly, calling him would probably be the… easiest way to get you down.”

“You’re the one in the mask. Why don’t you call someone?”

“Don’t be a hater. I’m a Junior Associate, which means I’m on assignment to this podunk nowheresville. I don’t know anyone within a thousand miles of here, and even if I did, I doubt I could keep a flyer’s attention long enough for him to spit on me.”

Catastrophe didn’t say anything. He just stared downwards.

“But… if you’d be willing to keep your eyes and lips closed for five minutes, and I mean damn well closed, I might be able to get you to the ground.”

“But my other options are so very attractive.”

God, Lash thought. What was it about superheroics that brought out bitchy sarcasm? Catastrophe had gone from cataconic to professional curmudgeon in less than five minutes just by being in his presence.

“Lift up your arms.”

Catastrophe did so and felt two enormous arms grip like a vise across his chest.  He felt wind rushing and rain spraying against his body. His stomach felt like it dropped a foot.  This feeling of movement lasted some time.

Suddenly, the sensation of movement stopped. “Three minutes,” Lash said. Lash let go and Catastrophe fell to the dank ground. He guessed it was an alley.

He could hear Rusty’s high-pitched voice talking excitedly with Lash around ten feet away.

After his time was up, Fox opened his eyes. Rusty was dancing and waving a card around. He proudly showed it to Fox.  The handwriting was blotchy and a bit rushed.

“To my most devoted (and only) fan:

Stay brave, eat well, and work in a nuclear power plant. Then you, too, might make the Social Justice League.

Lash

P .S. Whatever your fool uncle is thinking, tell him to stay as far away from us as possible.

“He gave you a pwesent too.”

Rusty pointed at Fox’s pocket. Fox rifled through and found a cell-phone that he had never seen before. He opened the phone and a business card fell out.

Lash McMaster

Social Justice League Junior Associate

New York, NY St. Louis, IL

When a problem comes along…

It also had his phone number (”reachable from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.”), but Fox assumed that the number would only reach the phone he had just been given. Lash obviously didn’t carry two phones in case he ever needed to give one away. Catastrophe reconsidered that assumption. Maybe superheroes did– he had absolutely no idea. It wouldn’t be convenient to have more than one set, but then, it didn’t seem particularly convenient to wear tights or a mask, either.

He called Oliver.

“Good God, where have you been? Where’s Rusty? I got home an hour ago and your phone didn’t work.”

It was going to be a pleasant ride with Oliver, he could tell.