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This message Premiere #24: Ancient Foes was posted by A response for those of you who wanted to see more of the pre-war Technoverse from... the Hooded Hood. on Tuesday, August 27, 2002 at 04:38.
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On the edge of what had once been continental Europe, a ring of islands were all that remained of the great landmass that had been there until the neutronics wars of ninety years ago. Mostly ungoverned and unstable, these pocket kingdoms were the Buffer States between the two great powers of Technopolis and Sov-Blok. It was in both sides interest to ensure that they stayed that way, despite the opportunities that created for slavers, tyrants, and criminals to run riot over the unfortunate people who clung to a grim existence there.
Florence was the exception. Somehow the great renaissance city’s defense shields had lasted long enough to protect it from the worst of the historical devastation. It still maintained a veneer of civilization on its rough broken island surrounded by pirates and parasites and the great worms that rose up from the radiation-soaked seas. It needed a firm leader to retain its status as the greatest of the old realms, and it got the leader it needed.
Belasco Medici was a ruthless man, and he used that ruthlessness to his best advantage. Everyone in the way between him and absolute power in Florence suffered tragic accidents. His family’s criminal empire blossomed under his leadership, rising in status and wealth until eventually he was able to literally buy absolute rulership of the city he ruled in all but name already.
Medici was quick to exploit his new authority. Secret deals with Sov-Blok and the Technopolis Science Council to host scientific processes deemed too dangerous or politically sensitive for their own territories magnified his vast wealth into a huge fortune. Medici ruled like a king of old, enjoying absolute power over his subjects that he never balked to use.
Nobody ever found out who was behind the Kaos Chain experiments. The Science Council always claimed it was an illegal Sov-Blok project in breach of the Qumran Treaty, a secret research program that went awry killing twenty thousand Florentines before the searing strands of vicious green energy were brought back under control. What nobody understood at first was that it was Medici who saved the rest of his fiefdom by walking alone to confront the energy; and that he overcame it by giving it a home in his body and his soul. Thus Belasco Medici became Count Armageddon, suddenly as physically powerful as he was financially and politically.
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In the flaming ruined tunnels beneath Raw Material Processing Plant # 11-D-9 Premiere and Count Armageddon struggled with their hands at each other’s throats. Armageddon’s kaos energies lashed out in razor strands, slashing across Premiere’s back and shoulders, ripping through flesh that could turn aside a small nuke. Their stinging venom seeped into the last science hero and burned him, whispering dark temptations in his mind, seeking to sear away that fragile core of honor and compassion to liberate him to pristine chaos.
“Do you feel it at last?” Count Armageddon hissed at his ancient enemy. “Yes, I think you do. So much more darkness inside you now for us to exploit, isn’t there, Premiere? You have come so far from that strutting little boy who dared thwart me long ago…”
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Nobody in Technopolis had cared about Medici’s increasingly arrogant demands for tribute from the Buffer Realms either, his claiming of “brides” as tribute for his forbearance, his occasional homicidal rages at states that did not grovel sufficiently for his liking. When Count Armageddon sent his demand for Technopolis to surrender up Science Councilor Mythris to his amusements he was ignored.
But the Science Police reacted quickly enough when Armageddon arrived to claim her, when he burst open half a dozen neutron reactors across the city as mere diversion. The science villain waited until as many of the law enforcers were around him as possible before lashing out with his kaos streams. The lucky victims died. The rest shambled off as kaos-filled zombies to slaughter their own kin. Waybender and Blue Lamp had tried to stop him but he had left their crucified remains beside what remained off Science Councilor Mythris after he had finished with her.
Count Armageddon retreated to his Florence stronghold secure in his power, having faced the might of great Technopolis and walked away unscathed.
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“Do you know what I see?” Victor Brooke asked Belasco Medici as he closed his fingers even tighter around his enemy’s neck. “What I know, with senses that can see a pebble on the moon or hear a whisper across the world?”
“Failure. Futility. Death,” suggested Armageddon. “Your allies are dying in the tunnels behind us. Your stronghold is broken. You are betrayed. Your people have made their noble last stand and it wasn’t good enough.”
“I can see every strand of your DNA, Armageddon. Every twist and turn that has been corrupted by the kaos energies you wield.” The hero grimaced. “There’s not much left of the original Medici now. Only a ghost of kaos energy pretending the role.”
“How many murders and deaths on your conscience, Premiere? How much failure? So very much for my kaos streamers to work on now. Do you feel them, burrowing into your soul as they burrow into your flesh? Once you could resist them, but now some broken, dark part of you welcomes their corruption.”
“I see nothing but a shell, old foe. A bitter caricature of a great but flawed man, clinging to an identity that was lost long since. Do you even enjoy the evil you do any more? Do you really think that even this battle with me will matter to you? Does anything matter now, kaos-phantom?”
“I can feel it, Premiere. You can’t keep me out any longer. There is the very core of your self, and my kaos energies shall rend it open and ravage it, and you shall call me master.”
“You want to see my core, Armageddon? See what’s really in there? Is that right?” snarled Premiere, his eyes narrowing to obsidian chips. “Very well.”
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The Science Council sent their very best. Clockwork Soldier took down the Florentine energy shields while Red Watchman burned the defensive air cover from the skies. Premiere and Lament went in on the ground, the science heroine’s scream sending the handpicked guardsmen and kaos zombies reeling away as they charged the palace.
Count Armageddon was waiting for them, dressed in the frills and finery of another age, Mythris’ internal organs clutched in his hand to mock them. “You think you can stop me, science heroes?” he laughed in his arrogance.
Lament went down to the kaos blast that cut a swath across the island with no care for the terrified populace. Premiere shrugged it off and loosed his thermal wave, sending the searing heat washing over Medici’s historic palace like the wrath of God. Treasure and building alike bubbled and cracked. Armageddon was distracted for just long enough.
Premiere’s first blow staggered the Count, and the second when Premiere had realized that he could use his full strength against this opponent spilled Armageddon back into the ruins of his stronghold. Medici screamed in rage and loosed the full might of the kaos within him, releasing those livid green strands of evil to shred his opponent.
It was a fragment of some now-shattered statuary masterpiece, perhaps the Venus de Milo or something of that kind, that Premiere snatched up from the wreckage and threw with deadly accuracy. It hammered through Armageddon’s chest like a bullet, although no bullet would have penetrated the kaos-shroud. While the villain gasped in shock at the sudden injury Premiere was upon him.
“Never again, Count,” Premiere told him. “This is the end.”
The Red Watchman arrived shortly afterwards to help him bring the science villain into custody.
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In the present, in the sundered service ducts beneath Technopolis, Count Armageddon screamed.
“No!” he gasped, trying to withdraw the kaos streamers from inside Victor Brooke.
It shouldn’t have been like this. Armageddon had been trying to break his corrupting kaos tentacles into Premiere’s very core for as long as they had battled, near on thirty years. He had sought to shred the essence of the science hero, drag him down and make of him a vile mockery of his former self, corrupted beyond redemption. And although he had sometimes carved through Premiere’s flesh he had never managed to break through that iron self-will before. Until now.
And then Belasco Medici realized that he hadn’t broken through. Premiere had let him through. Let him in.
It was an ambush no less than the one Count Armageddon had set for the infiltrators creeping into Technopolis.
“Something wrong, Count?” Premiere hissed, his hands still at the science villain’s throat. “Didn’t understand the new rules of engagement? Didn’t realize that there are some things more powerful than that kaos energy that rules you? Having difficulty withdrawing from my mind?”
“Let me go!” Armageddon demanded. “Get off me.”
“Thought you were the most terrible thing around?” Premiere said. “Nothing more terrifying than your kaos force, than absolute evil?” He leaned right into Medici’s face as he snapped his foe’s neck. “You were wrong.”
The only thing more terrifying than absolute evil is absolute good.
Premiere ripped Armageddon’s head off to make sure he was dead and watched until the spitting kaos energies died. Then he seared the body with thermal blasts until there was no chance of DNA survival.
And then he turned round to take on the science police and save his friends and get them out.
And then he intended to invade Technopolis.
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- Premiere #24: Ancient Foes - A response for those of you who wanted to see more of the pre-war Technoverse from... the Hooded Hood. - 04:38 on August 27, 2002
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