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This message Tales of the Parodyverse #1: Amazement was posted by spiffy on Sunday, January 12, 2003 at 18:04.
Amazement
His name is James Morgan, his friends call him Jamie. He’s been in prison twice, first for armed robbery and then for assault. He’s holding a knife to a woman’s throat. He’s fumbling with the button to his fly. He’s about to rape her. And he doesn’t think he’ll get away with it.
I know this because I have extraordinary cosmic senses. I can skim the surface of minds as easily as I can leap over tall buildings in a single bound. I’m not just some ordinary guy. I’m an Amazing Guy.
An image of the Dark Knight crosses over Jamie’s consciousness, and he’s frightened and he’s thrilled. A mental picture of Exile is accompanied by feelings of anticipation, exhilaration. Messenger is next, but this thought makes James laugh. Messenger’s dead. Messenger can’t stop him. Someone else will.
He’s right. I’ll stop him.
His boxers are at his knees when suddenly he falls upwards in an energy dome of my making. He’s startled but not scared as the ground falls away. I get the impression he wanted this, but I don’t know why. As an afterthought, I pull his boxers back up with energy tweezers. Nobody wants to see that.
“You’re safe now,” I call down to the girl from where I’m hovering, ten feet off the ground. She stares up at me with tearful eyes. She’s shaking. She’s thinking of home, of her warm bed and her living room, of comfort and security. I’m glad. This way, I don’t need to ask for her address. “Don’t let this frighten you, ma’am,” I assure her. “I’m just going to pick you up and take you home.”
She doesn’t reply. She looks at me and tears stream down her face. She doesn’t even react when a platform appears under her, lifting her off the ground. In under a minute, I’ve dropped her off in front of her house. She recognises the door and opens it and goes inside. I wait until I hear the lock click. Then I turn to James.
“You’re going to jail now,” I explain to him. We shoot into the air. I mentally locate the nearest police station and aim myself in its direction. Everything is going according to routine, until I hear laughter from the energy globe beneath me. I look down at him. “What’s so funny?”
He meets my gaze with his. It’s calm and unconcerned. A quick glance at his thoughts reveals that they’re the same.
“I’ll be in jail for tonight, and that’s it,” he tells me. “There’s no evidence. You saw that girl, she’s a wreck. There’s no way she’s gonna report me. It’s your word against mine. And, buddy, of the two of us, I’m the one not hiding behind a mask.”
The words slice through me, but I don’t show it. “We’ll let the law decide that, young man.”
He’s not done talking. “I knew you’d catch me,” he says, then corrects himself, “Okay, I didn’t know you’d catch me. But one of you. One of you superheroes, thinking you’re doing so much good for society, for humanity. That’s why I did it. So I could get away with it and rub it in your face.
“How many people died in the time it took to catch me? How many accidents and murders and natural disasters were there? How many of them could you have stopped? All those people died so you could have the privilege of sending me to jail for a single night. Congratulations. You got me.”
“Hey, look at that- your stop,” I say, and my voice is more gruff than I remember. We burst into the police department. The desk sergeant is startled, and I feel a pang of guilt for frightening him. I don’t feel a pang when I drop James and he grunts in pain. He’ll be bruised. I’m almost glad.
It takes less than five minutes for me to explain what happened, and they cart him off to a holding cell. He looks at me over his shoulder. He’s smiling. And he’s thinking about what he’s going to do tomorrow night, and who he’s going to do it to.
I can’t sleep. It’s just insomnia.
Janeen is lying next to me. She’s not snoring, but she’s almost snoring. Her breaths are loud and steady, creating an almost mesmerising rhythm. I try to lose myself in it and let myself be carried away by the sound of the life beside me. I study her face. I feel her hair, resting on the tips of my fingers. She’s wonderful. But I can’t get lost, I can’t close my eyes, I can’t sleep.
Insomnia. Nothing more.
The kids are sleeping. My amazing bunch of children, all asleep. If I extend my senses, I can hear their snores, hear them as they shift in their beds. Sara’s having a bad dream, with monsters chasing her and no one to save her. I concentrate, pulling all my cosmic awareness together in a bundle and projecting it to her sleeping form. My hand starts to shake and a bead of sweat appears above my eye. I create the mental image of a heroic knight and let it dance on the edge of her consciousness. Gradually, her mind grabs hold of the picture and pulls it in. The monsters are vanquished. The good guys win. And a smile forms on my daughter’s face.
I’m tired now. I’m no telepath. It’s hard to reach out to another mind. But it was worth it.
I’m tired, but I can’t sleep. Insomnia.
Around me, LittleSmallville is silent. Few are awake, fewer are out of their beds. I’m alone in my wakefulness. I’m alone with my thoughts.
James’ words are keeping me awake.
Confessing that is a relief. I’m letting a psychopath keep me disadvantaged. You’d think that the confession would let me go to sleep, but it doesn’t. I’m more conscious than ever.
I’m Amazing Guy. I draw upon the power of the Multiverse itself to create extraordinary objects of any shape or size. I can travel as fast as the light of the stars. I can extend my awareness to the edge of the universe. I can see through retcons. I can create passageways through space and time.
I spent my evening preventing a rape. While I was doing that, a man was murdered in GothaMetropolis. A young couple drowned in California, caught by riptides during their honeymoon. The home of an abortion doctor in Saskatchewan was burnt down by Molotov cocktails, and the family died. A terrorist struck in the Middle East. A baby died of starvation in an alley in the heart of New Zealand. And that’s just the beginning of the list.
I certainly am amazing.
I need to get outside.
Janeen doesn’t wake up as I carefully push myself out from under the sheets, or as I kiss her on the cheek. She doesn’t even stir as I walk through a hole in space/time to emerge in our backyard. My feet leave the ground. My pyjamas transform into a colourful costume. I soar above the buildings. I let my awareness flow outwards.
In the suburbs, Nats is battling Cyaneyed. He is losing. His Lair Legion communicard has been shattered. He’s on his own. He dodges the extradimensional maniac’s violent lunge and rockets away. Cyaneyed teleports in front of him. His fist meets Nats’ chin. Nats is rendered unconscious as he is thrown high into the air.
I catch him with an enormous catcher’s mitt and lower him gently to the sidewalk. Cyaneyed notices me. It’s time to fight.
“I want Goldeneyed,” he growls, “but you’ll do until he shows up.”
In the space between heartbeats he disappears and I don’t see him reappear behind me. I don’t find out where he is until a super-powered kick catches me in the small of my back. I grunt and spin and lash out with an energy fist. He teleports in the instant before it hits him, but I’m ready for him this time. He appears behind me again, but my palm closes around his fist just before it can strike my head.
“You might want to change your name to Blackeyed,” I quip as my fist meets his face. He’s probably heard that joke before. I need new material. ‘What kind of villain has cyan eyes?’ maybe. I release him and he tumbles backwards, vanishing before he hits the ground and materialising in front of me.
He punches me in the chin, and I reel. I do the same, and he reels. We grapple in the air, him vanishing and appearing, almost seeming to float with the frequency of his teleports. I hit him in the gut with a solid energy construct. He pops out of midair in front of me, slamming both fists into the top of my head.
And it’s all so pointless.
I extend my consciousness, making sure that no civilians are below us to be harmed when eventually one of us is forced to the ground. I misjudge the range of my new powers and extend it too far. I see a man deep in the Arctic Circle, cut off from his camp and hopelessly lost. I hear his last heartbeat. I see a teenage girl cut down by gunfire in China, an innocent victim of a political conflict. And I see myself, wasting time, trading blows with a mockery of another hero.
I am the Protector of the Universe. It’s not enough for me to occupy myself with Cyaneyed or Anvil Man or the Purveyors of Peril. I need to protect.
No more dawdling. I’m insanely powerful. It’s time I started showing it.
I let Cyaneyed in close enough to get in a good hit to my gut. This gives me the time to focus my cosmic senses completely and utterly on him. He disappears through a dimensional portal, but this time I follow his course through space. I see where he’s going to come out. I’m waiting for him there when he does.
A quick and decisive blow sends his surprised form plummeting. He instinctively opens a portal that will save him from the impact. Just as quickly, I use my powers to close it. Cyaneyed had expected to be transported up into the air and to strike me on the way down. Instead, he hits the pavement and he hits it hard.
It took twenty-eight seconds to beat Cyaneyed after a battle that had lasted over eight minutes.
Amazing.
A note left on my bed informs Janeen that I’m “out superheroing for the day… I love you, honey!” A call to work falsely informs them that I’ve come down with a nasty cold and that I’m taking a sick day. I feel bad about lying, but the world needs me.
I float tranquilly above my roof and allow my cosmic consciousness to spread out in all directions, wrapping around the globe. I force myself to ignore all the minor events. My senses pass over an unconscious girl, victim of a drug overdose, whose pulse is slowing, and over a man holding a knife to another man’s throat, demanding his wallet. A pang of guilt shoots through me with every scene I ignore, but all recriminations fade away as I take notice of a car hurtling down the highway. It has five passengers, two parents and their three children, along with the family dog. The family is asleep. The father is driving. His eyes are drooping, his chin falling to his chest with fatigue. The car begins to edge over the center line. A half-kilometre away, a rental car containing four businessmen approaches.
I vanish, travelling at light speed towards the potential accident. I arrive within milliseconds, matching the speed of the driverless car. A tendril of energy reaches past the window and nudges the steering wheel, straightening it. A few moments later, the second car zooms harmlessly past. The tendril reaches down to remove the man’s foot from the gas pedal and slowly applies the brake. The car slows to a stop on the edge of the road and I cut the engine. The family is blissfully unaware of how close they’d come to disaster. Ten lives are saved with less than thirty seconds’ effort.
While I scan the planet for more emergencies, I have time to carry the overdosed girl to a hospital.
The rest of the morning is a flurry of rescues. I’m unable to count the number of lives that I save. A medical supply truck with a faulty transmission suddenly finds itself thrust through a rip in space/time to the centre of the African village that had been its destination. Another drug shipment, this one with less charitable intentions, finds itself floating harmlessly in outer space while the shippers are treated to a surprise visit by the local police, their pockets stuffed with cocaine. Construction workers are saved from being crushed by a fallen girder with the help of an energy platform.
By mid-afternoon, though, I start to feel the toll of my actions. I’m not tired, physically. I could keep up this pace for weeks. But the choices are slowly eating away at my soul.
I choose to save three civilians from a highway pile-up while one is killed by a drunk driver. I ignore a robbery in favour of a drowning child and a man with a gun to his head. I see a child turn on a gas fireplace then forget about it as he notices an action figure laying on the floor. Instead of dealing with that, I’m needed in Moscow where the second floor of an apartment complex has erupted into flames.
I vacate the blazing floor within three seconds, swooping through and towing the inhabitants behind me in globes of energy. I then spread a layer of energy across the ceiling that extends through the entire building, impermeable even to air save for tiny holes interspersed over its surface. I lower it slowly, forcing all the oxygen away from the flames. They are extinguished. The rest of the building is evacuated in under twenty seconds.
It wasn’t a sensational and dramatic rescue, but it also took less than a minute and I saved about thirty people. I’m getting better every time.
The cosmic senses reach out one more. This time, I see a mother and her four children lying on the ground after inhaling noxious gas fumes, and I promise myself that I will save them- as soon as I’ve rescued a rally of protestors in France from certain doom at the hands of La Justice Sanglante, a terrorist with the ability to manipulate environmental conditions.
It takes me a quarter-second to arrive in Paris. La Justice Sanglante doesn’t notice me hovering in the air right beside him as he gathers air currents around him to send downwards in a gale-force wind. He’s so intent on that task that he doesn’t see my fist coming at his face. The air disperses harmlessly. The terrorist is arrested. The rally continues. And the whole process took one minute, fifteen seconds.
In that time, the mother and her four children have asphyxiated and their immobile bodies are cooling. A part of me dies and I start to pull my senses away from that tragedy in search of a new one. But something stops me.
The house feels familiar. So does the mother. And the kids.
My mind explodes and I teleport to LittleSmallville.
“Sweetie, I thought you weren’t going to come in the front door with your costume anymore.”
“Janeen!”
“Because the last time you did it, you spent the next week worrying that someone might have seen you come in and was preparing to expose your secret identity.”
“Where are the kids?”
“In the living room, playing with their action figures. And your cape is caught in the screen door.”
“You’re alive!”
“You’re observant! Did you have a bad day or something? Sara called from work, asking if you were okay. I told her you were puking. Actually, my exact words were ‘he just made a multicoloured stain on the carpet… I think it used to be Fruit Loops’.” She stops and looks me in the eyes for the first time since I barged in. “I was worried about you. You don’t usually disappear like that unless something bad happened. Are you okay?”
I run up to her and hug her and my cape rips in the door but I don’t care. She’s warm in my arms, and her lips are alive against mine. Through our kiss, the image of her corpse dances through my mind. I had seen her die, suffocated in our home. My cosmic senses are never wrong. But this time they were. I’m glad.
“Am I okay?” The question seems to be an understatement. “I’m amazing.”
“Obviously,” she gasps. “That was quite a kiss. Do you want to tell me what I did to deserve it?”
“You’re my wife and the mother of my kids. I don’t think you need a better reason.”
“I like your logic.” She kisses me again. “Go say hi to the kids, they’ve been wondering when daddy was going to get home.”
I let go of her reluctantly, afraid that she’ll vanish when the contact is broken. But she doesn’t. She just smiles at me. I smile back and walk into the living room where Dave is riding on Laura’s energy horse while Katie and Sara play with blocks.
“No powers in the house,” I chastise her half-heartedly. All four of them look up and their mouths curve upwards and they yell “Daddy!”. And I know that I’m at home and everything’s okay.
Until I look at the fireplace.
My cosmic senses told me that my family was dead. They told me that the fireplace leaked and killed them.
My cosmic senses are never wrong. I can see to the end of the universe. I can see last week and next month. I can see the nucleus of an atom. I can see through retcons.
Janeen steps into the doorway. My cosmic senses flash unconsciously.
I can see through retcons.
I can see through… Janeen.
Somewhere on the planet a hooded figure nods, satisfied that I’ve noticed him, and turns back to his business. Surrounded by my family, I can’t bring myself to worry about what the price is going to be.
His name is James Morgan. He spent last night in prison, but now he’s free. He just pulled a knife on a man walking home from night shift. He wants the man’s wallet. He doesn’t think he’ll get away with it.
I know this, because I videotaped it.
James sighs in annoyance when he’s lifted off the ground in an energy dome for the second time in as many days. “For an Amazing Guy, you sure don’t have an amazing learning curve.”
“I’m not an Amazing Guy. I’m just a guy who can do amazing things.” He looks up and sees the videocamera. “And you’re going to jail now.”
This time, as we fly towards the police station, he doesn’t say anything at all.
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