Chapter 11.5
"Prelude to Assembly"
by Flank McLargehuge
The Manhattan Waterfront.
In the last year the pier, unremarkable though it (or what was left of it) seemed, had become something of a local curiosity. It had started with a prolonged fight between several of the city’s superheroes; a fight with ended on the pier, resulting in the suspected drowning of one of the combatants, and the burning of a good two-thirds of the sturdy wooden structure in a huge, white fireball. Months passed; the fight was forgotten as the City That Never Sleeps was given far grander spectacles to view. Giant, rampaging robots; a mass sacrifice of heroes; crystalline towers in Central Park; a flash of light that filled the entire planet’s skies. It was as if the city, growing tired of each new marvel it produced, was in a constant drive to outdo itself, to shock and delight even its own infinitely-calloused sensibilities.
But the pier maintained a kind of quiet dignity throughout all this, as if the events that had brought it attention had left more than the deep scorching of much of its length and a ten-foot hole in the midst of the boardwalk. The pier was left with almost a tangible sense of *presence*. Kids would tiptoe out across the fragile charcoal of the middle section to the undamaged far side of the boardwalk, just to feel the August sun leave goose bumps on their flesh. The was something eerie about the pier, but those who lived and worked nearby chose to ignore the sensation.
This collective willful ignorance became harder to sustain when the researchers began showing up the week before, setting up state-of-the-art scanning devices, hiding behind a cordon of yellow tape with the initials “GT” stenciled on it. They claimed to be studying the long-term effects of the energies that’d caused the inferno of the summer previous, and making sure there was no harmful, lasting residue in the air or spreading out into the bay. The locals whispered behind their hands, and kept their eyes on the technicians. The pier had been decimated by the Human Torch, not some dirty, radioactive mutant; why would there be anything left that was harmful? Fire was fire. The general consensus held that there was something else going on, far different from the official story; and from the way the researchers hid their results so thoroughly, probably far more sinister too.
The two individuals out on the pier that night would have only reinforced those fears, if they had been seen... But for some reason, it was always hard to see the full length of the pier after dark. Still, the man in the suit took no chances as he lit his cigarette, turning his back to the shore and smothering the light with his palm, then stooping to retrieve the bowling ball-sized hunk of polished metal he’d set down. He said nothing as he took his first drag, continuing to silently survey the boardwalk, and the water beyond, as he smoked the rest of it. He could feel his companion’s desire that the silence conclude, but the man in the suit waited, basking in the other man’s uncomfortableness. It was only as the toe of his shoe spread his spent cigarette across the boards underfoot that he opened his mouth.
“Do you feel it?” The words dripped from his mouth, seeming to puddle invisibly in the air in front of him.
“Yes,” came the guarded reply. “It is here.”
“My contractors have done well. I shall see to it that they are rewarded. Our source was telling the truth after all. Perhaps we should finally grant him that death he’s been so looking forward to.”
“N-no.” The man in the suit glanced up, an eyebrow raised. In the short time since he had met his companion, he had grown accustomed to the taller man’s quiet aspect. It was rare for him to speak out, uninvited. “I still... There is still use for him for some time more. It would take many to replace him. I would prefer he stays... where he is now.”
The man in the suit already had a second cigarette at his lips, but thought better of it. Filthy habit; he’d been trying to quit for months. He pressed it back into his coat pocket, and tried hard not to sigh in annoyance. “I grow tired of this. Come, my steed,” (his companion rankled, as expected. It was not a term he was especially fond of. Which was exactly why the man in the suit used it, of course...) “Let us leave this place.”
A few moments later, they were someplace else, a place shrouded in a darkness so much more profound than any on earth that it felt almost liquid. It was here the presence they sought lurked.
The man in the suit cleared his throat, and was slightly unnerved when the darkness immediately swallowed the sound. He opened his mouth, absently fingering the openings in the hunk of metal he held, and spoke in a loud, but conversational and natural-sounding voice, as if he was addressing someone across a table in a crowded restaurant, rather than an unseen presence in an alien void.
“I’m looking for someone.” he began, as authoritative and poised as he could muster. “His name is Michael.” The darkness around him shuttered at the sound, as if it were a living thing. “Or rather, I am looking for what lives here now, which long ago answered to Michael.” The man in the suit felt as if someone’s eyes were on him now. Knowing he’d found his audience, be began his sales pitch.
Sympathy and understanding oozed from his voice. “I can only imagine how difficult it must be for you to be left to exist in this void, deprived of any substance or sensation, cut off from the world of matter and life. It must be especially hard to face this imprisonment so soon after what seemed like your ultimate triumph.” (The darkness sighed softly. Or that’s how the man in the suit and his companion perceived it.) “I know what it is like to have your ultimate goal snatched from your grasp by creatures who can’t possibly understand what they’ve done.
I know the anguish you must feel, your hate at the world and the cruelty of the animals that live in it.” The air seemed to tense as he spoke, a restrained violence in it, becoming more pronounced with every sentence. The man in the suit smiled inwardly. Easy. “But I also know how you can channel your anger, how you can free yourself from this nebulous elsewhere and find your revenge on everything that left you to rot here! And I can give you a vessel in the human world. A very powerful one.”
From the darkness, roused into a roiling fervor by the man’s silky words, came a sound, a strange alien noise that tried very hard to pronounce the syllables a human throat had long ago crafted for it. “Cccccccaaggggeeeee.....?”
“No, not Cage.” said the man in the suit. He raised the hunk of polished metal in his hand and looked down at it, and though he couldn’t see the object through the impenetrable darkness, his fingers roved across it, feeling the edges of the eye holes, the mesh grill over the mouth, and the raised triangle at the center of the forehead.
His lips curled back in an invisible grin.
“But their names do rhyme.”
or
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