• [ASH] REPOST: ASH #120 - City of Night Part 1: Gloaming

    From Dave Van Domelen@21:1/5 to All on Mon Oct 11 17:31:01 2021
    [Cover is vertically split, with the Sun on the middle line. On the
    left side is a half-sunset behind a mountain surrounded by jungle. On the right is a cityscape at night, with no Sun on its half. A shadowy silhouette of a woman straddles the boundary, looking out over both scenes.]

    .|. COHERENT COMICS UNINCORPORATED presents ACADEMY OF SUPER-HEROES #120 --X------------------------------------------------------------------------
    '|` /|(`| | City of Night Part 1 of 6: Gloaming
    /-|.)|-| copyright 2013 by Dave Van Domelen ___________________________________________________________________________


    ACADEMY OF SUPER-HEROES ROLL CALL

    CODENAME REAL NAME POWERS ASSIGNMENT -------- --------- ------ ---------- Solar Max Jonathan Zachary Spacetime Control AMERICA
    "JakZak" Taylor
    Meteor Sarah Grant-Taylor Superspeed AMERICA Poniente Esmeralda Colina Wind Mage AMERICA
    Scorch Scott Handleman Pyrokinetic CANADA Centurion Salvatore Napier Strength, Regeneration MEXICO
    Fury Arin Kelsey Concussion Blasts MEXICO
    Contact Aaron Zander Psi, Mind-over-Body DIPLOMATIC Breaker Christina Li Telekinesis DIPLOMATIC Essay Sara Ana Henderson Gadgeteer VENUS
    Peregryn Howard Henderson Jr. Elemental Mage VENUS
    Beacon George Sylvester Living Light VENUS
    Geode Unknown Living Crystal VENUS Lightfoot Tom Dodson Velocity Control TRANSIT ------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    [December 29, 2026 - Pawtucket, Rhode Island Sector]

    In the end, there had been very little discussion needed. Keiko had
    been all ready to get her DSHA personnel together and make sure none of them would try to pressure the extradimensional refugees into rushing a decision, but as soon as everyone who had required sedation the day before had
    recovered enough to join the discussion, the decision was made.
    Poniente, the young Mexican mage who had recently joined ASH, was directing the ceremony, assisted by two of the mystically-trained refugees. Neither of them had ever possessed much power, and now seemed to be strict normals as far as anyone could tell (but even the flying woman, Sharon, or
    the old ogre Jed registered zero on any Tesla indicators). Despite lack of apparent power, both the tattooed young Cambodian and the woman with bizarre ritual scars and voodoo-like trappings knew their way around a ritual.
    "You all should understand something before we start," Poniente
    addressed the crowd in the borrowed university lecture hall, a crowd which would have seemed fairly large if it hadn't represented the sum total of survivors from an entire reality. "In our world, magic is unnatural. Literally. It is an exercise of will that violates the laws of the world. Therefore, it is always easier to perform magic that at least remains in harmony with nature rather than smashing through it like a maddened bull.
    The ritual in which you will be participating as both subjects and actors has been designed to appeal to one of the Pillars of Reality, restoring a piece
    of the balance by binding you to our world...instead of excising you, which
    is what will happen eventually if we do not act."
    The crowd murmured uneasily. They knew they were strangers in a strange land, they'd been told that their very presence broke the laws of nature, but it was still uncomfortable to be reminded of that fact.
    "Sangvath," she gestured at the Cambodian, "and M'emba," a glance at the scarred woman, "have contributed their knowledge of the rules of magic from your world so that this ritual could be adapted to the purpose of connecting your spirits to a new world."
    From what little information had been gathered on the motley groups that banded together to help flee the dying universe, Keiko knew "M'emba" wasn't
    the woman's birth name, it came from a language that no one living had spoken for centuries or millennia on their world, the language of gods who had been overthrown so thoroughly that mundane history had no record of them. Much
    like the fate of some of the gods in Keiko's own world. She only knew a
    little Cambodian, but she suspected "Sangvath" was a pseudonym as well,
    albeit an appropriate one...it meant persistence. And anyone who could fight through across time and realities had to be persistent, if nothing else.
    "If everything works as we hope, the world will treat you as natives
    when we are done. Those of you with paranormal abilities may find them
    blunted or removed, but it's impossible to be sure. One possible consequence is that all of the unnaturalness of your collective existence will be transferred to a single person, who could gain power from it...or become the judas goat who dies to save the rest. Your memories should be largely untouched, although some of the gaps will probably start filling in with
    local names and places," Poniente explained. "Now everyone, try to
    concentrate on who you are. Your sense of identity, or events that made you who you are. The stronger your sense of self as we complete the ritual, the easier it will be for reality to make a connection to you."
    A strained hush fell over the crowd.
    Poniente began, chanting in what Keiko thought was Latin, although
    tinged with strangeness. M'emba joined in with a gutteral tongue that didn't sound like it had ever been intended for human throats, and Sangvath chanted
    a mantra without words. It felt strange, like she was at a musical
    performance by an aggressively experimental vocal trio, but the mood of the audience was far darker and more brittle.

    "Is that it?" someone in the crowd asked after the ritual had ended and silence had filled the hall for nearly a minute. "I don't feel any different...."
    Poniente nodded. "I was hoping there would be no dramatic results. We wished to gently ease you across the boundary, not smash through. It may be days or even weeks for changes to happen, and they will hopefully be so
    subtle they will feel natural."
    "Looks like I kept some powers," Sharon Venturi demonstrated by rising from her seat and continuing to rise into the air. "I was mainlining the powers of Creation for so long it's hard to remember what it was like when I was *just* a superhuman, but I think I ended up pretty close to where I used
    to be."
    "Still a troll," old man Jed shrugged his massive green shoulders.
    "Guess there was a little too much real science in what happened to me, and this world's fine with me stayin' this way. Ah well."

    Throughout the initially-tentative but strengthening celebrations that followed, M'emba accepted thanks and congratulations, but largely kept her
    own counsel. Secrets were something she had a lifetime of experience hiding, and she had a new one. The ceremony had kindled new power within her: not
    the power over storm and death that she had once wielded, but power nonetheless.
    But how could she have the power of a shaman when her dead gods had
    passed beyond death into total nonexistence?

    * * * *

    [December 31, 2026 - Berlin, Germany]

    Klaus hefted his mug, "Enjoy life! You're longer dead than alive, and longer in the dark than the light!"
    This was met by a smattering of "Prost!", "Zum wohl!" and various
    drunken slurrings that were untranslatable but generally approving.
    "All praise to the Dark Lady!" Engela waved her joint in an
    approximation of a toast, then looked about distractedly for the beer she was certain she'd just set down a minute ago. Or so.
    "The weakling lovers of light saved the Sun this year, but soon the Sun will set for the last time, and darkness will rule the world as it did in
    times of old," Klaus added. Everyone knew they'd had absolutely nothing to
    do with the sealing away of the Sun, but they all felt it was a sign that
    their dark goddess was in the ascendant. And if the Sun's final demise was
    not obviously the doing of their patroness...well, she worked in arcane ways, did she not? Darkness was her strength and her shield.

    * * * *

    [December 31, 2026 - Chicago, Illinois Sector]

    "I just flew in from the coast, and boy are my everything tired," Sharon slumped into one of the chairs in the ASH headquarters lounge.
    "I'm sure the DSHA docs were thrilled when you decided to test out your restored powers that way," Tina smirked, handing the interdimensional refugee
    a mug of hot cocoa.
    "Mmmm," Sharon sipped gratefully. "I am so glad your version of Earth
    has chocolate too. It would suck so bad if that was one of the holes in my memories...not only to have no chocolate, but to be unable to remember what
    it was even called!"
    "Horror of horrors!" Lightfoot chuckled. "Before I head back to
    Missouri for the countdown, I've got a question for you, Sharon."
    "Yes?"
    "Well, I was reading over all the debriefing files while I was pacing
    your flight, and I was wondering about that death god you say you helped destroy."
    "Ugh. There's something whose name I don't mind forgetting," she shuddered. "What about him?"
    "Well, it doesn't sound like he ever had a lot of worshippers. A few people, like M'emba, followed his pantheon, but it seems like most of his servants were created beings," Lightfoot ventured.
    Sharon nodded. "Pretty much. I never got a whole lot of the story, but there was a bunch of gods who lost out in their wars when humans were still using flint knives and bearskins. I'm told your gods had similar losers."
    "Yeah, and that's kinda my point," Tom frowned speculatively. "When
    gods lose out, they end up much less powerful. Q'Nos, the mythical minotaur, used to be a god but now he's so weak we could actually hold our own against him in a fair fight a while back. He's still really powerful, but not at the god level anymore. If your death god only had a few worshippers, how could
    he be so powerful that he threatened existence?"
    "Applied theology was never my strong suit," Sharon gulped down the last of the mug and cast about for where to get a refill. "Maybe our gods didn't need worshippers, they just found 'em convenient."
    Tina sent a golden tendril of force out to pick up a fresh mug and fill
    it at the urn on the other side of the room.
    "Show off," Lightfoot muttered.
    "Heh," Tina brought the fresh mug over to Sharon, the golden aura dissipating once the mug was safely in her hands. "Sounds like you mostly
    had Primal gods," Tina suggested.
    "What?" Tom arched an eyebrow. "Those weren't covered at the Academy."
    "I wouldn't expect them to be. They're kinda theoretical. I only know about them because I did a lot of reading up on gods and demigods around the time of my mission to China last year. The reasoning goes like this: there's
    a huge gap between us superhumans and even the weakest of the gods. They
    gain their tremendous power because they learned how to tap the power of worship. But plenty of dark mages have tried to figure that out themselves
    and failed...every apotheosis plan that has come even close to succeeding has tried to jumpstart the would-be god's power up to a level where they hoped to start getting more power from their followers. So how did the original gods reach whatever level was needed?"
    "There had to be a way to get godlike power without worshippers," Sharon interjected. "Like how our world-killer mad god went from mortal to godly by devouring realities." A shadow passed over her face at the recollection.
    The mad god had set in motion the end of all things when he set about
    devouring realities.
    "Exactly. These early godlings found a way to great power first, then
    got their faith batteries running later. There's several theories on how
    this happened, but Primal gods are those who scholars think managed to tap
    into some sort of fundamental principle of the universe," Tina explained.
    "Like death," Tom nodded.
    "Right. The 'portfolios' of the gods we know may well be a remnant of their origins as Primal gods, and those that lose worshippers are still
    strong if they can recall their connection to that source. Phaeton was definitely a worship-junkie when he showed up during the Dyson Sphere crisis, but his raw power was way above Q'Nos's. Q'Nos claimed the Leviathan was his mother, suggesting he was born into godhood and never established his own
    link to a power source other than worship. But if our myths have even the slightest connection to real history, the Titans were fairly early gods, so
    it makes sense they'd have been Primal at one time. Lucky for us, as a Sun
    god Phaeton had to share his Primal source with a lot of other gods, but he
    was still no laughing matter...he could draw on a lot more might than Q'Nos, even though he has no followers to speak of. I'm just glad he wasn't strong enough to avoid whatever the heck got done to him."
    "Ah, gods running around making a mess," Sharon mused over her now half-empty second mug. "Starting to feel more like home all the time...."

    * * * *

    [January 4, 2027 - Khadam]

    "Well, that was certainly interesting," Derek Radner switched the large screen to a pastoral view and leaned back in his recliner. The Chancellor's quarters weren't quite as old-school luxurious as the palace in Monaco, but new-school luxury had its charms as well. Not that he would have minded a
    bare concrete room so long as he had the same company as snuggled up against him now.
    "How?" Angelique asked. "Amateur acting, decent visuals, but not much
    of a plot to it. Big monster shows up, heroes arrive and beat it down. All
    it was missing was bad dubbing from Japanese into English."
    "True, as entertainment it was pretty weak," Derek admitted. "But that was actually very good acting...if you realize that most of the characters
    were artificial intelligences." [As seen in LNH 2027 #1 - Ed.]
    "What?"
    "One of them was definitely human, and not a great actor. Another one
    I'm not sure of, but the monster? Since I officially handed the Conclave's reins over to Glyph, I've been trying to take this Chancellor gig seriously."
    "Only inasmuch as you seem to be trying to imitate Dan Tracey lately," Angelique snarked. It sounded good-natured, but Derek inwardly winced.
    There'd been some friction between him and his wife lately because of the
    long hours he'd been putting in so that he'd be more than a figurehead.
    "Anyway, one thing I've been trying to get a handle on has been our AI program. Or programs. We have a lot of very unethical computer scientists playing around with leftover TwenCen AIs and alien tech, and the net is littered with what amount to giant monsters. I happen to know that both the Combine and the EU have several supernormals working on trying to clean up after us. And I've been cracking down on this end...not because I'm such an upstanding global citizen, mind you," Angelique giggled at this, "but because at some point it becomes bad for us too. But to get to the actual point, I'm almost certain that the giant monster being fought in that show was actually one of our rogues." He gestured with his gauntleted hand and the screen flickered to display a computer window, which scrolled rapidly through
    various pages until Derek found the one he was looking for. "Yep, the time
    and node match up. It was one of Heinrich Vogel's babies. And since a
    former fellow Academy grad named Nate Walker has appointed himself one of the sheriffs of the Net, I'm guessing the leader of this Legion of Net.Heroes was Nate."
    "But the rest are AIs we didn't build?"
    Derek nodded. "I hear they prefer to be called ACs, but yeah. When you've written as many AIs as I have, you start to pick up on the usual
    tells." He didn't feel the need to remind his wife that the very first successful AI of his had been modeled after his first love, the doomed Cassandra. She knew about Cass, of course, but one doesn't poke at a beehive unless it is absolutely necessary.
    Unfortunately, he was starting to think it might be necessary. He'd
    never found out what happened to the Cassandra program, and if ACs were starting to get organized to defend themselves against Khadamite AIs, what might they be capable of if they had access to a program designed to predict the future?

    * * * *

    [January 6, 2027 - Bell Regio, Venus]

    Noire set her small scramjet down in a clear space on the mountainside, long shadows cast by the setting Sun in the East pointing fingers along the ground and vanishing into the growing darkness of the jungle below. At least if the strange readings the satellites had picked up were hostile, she'd have plenty of shadows to meld into.
    The Sun was really setting in the West, of course, by definition. Planetary scientists avoided the thorny issues of tilted axes and retrograde rotation by simply defining East as whatever direction the Sun rose. When
    the shudder caused by the Leviathan's arrival reversed the direction of the planet's spin, that should have changed the maps so that Montreal was now
    near the South Pole instead of the North. But by the time a planetary scientist was consulted, people were already used to saying the Sun came up
    in the West and set in the East. On a planet as strange as post-Leviathan Venus, it was somehow more comfortable to keep the old maps and just deal
    with more weirdness. Noire was sure that in the same official circles that
    had decided Pluto wasn't a planet, Montreal was now located near the South
    Pole of Venus.
    Nothing seemed stranger than the baseline at the moment, though. If
    this micro-continent had lizardmen on it, they were keeping their distance rather than massing to attack. It wasn't as if the scramjet was a sneaky
    mode of transportation.
    Sara Jane unlatched the container from inside the scramjet's small cargo compartment and opened it up to reveal several dozen small metal scarabs.
    They were Essay's clever response to Bronzewing's habit of shooting down any satellite that actually got close enough to get decent readings: drones. Inspired by Heraclius's "children" and designed with help from Gimble, they would spread out and collect data, using microwave antennae to bounce signals off the planet's newly-formed ionosphere when a high-orbit satellite wasn't overhead. Power was tricky, since the night lasted several months, and solar panels weren't an option. But Essay claimed to have found a solution.
    "Fly, be free," Noire chuckled as she activated the drones and sent them scurrying off into the deep shadows of the jungle below the plateau. Powers
    or no, she wasn't going to make the horror movie cliche mistake of investigating in person.
    The shadows seemed more inviting than frightening, but they always had
    for Sara Jane. Academy metapsychologists thought her natural affinity for darkness had shaped her powers rather than her powers leading to her liking
    the dark, but she wasn't sure. The more overt parts of her magene hadn't really kicked in until her teenaged years, but she couldn't remember a time when she hadn't been able to at least pull the shadows around herself like a cloak and evade detection. Moving from shadow to shadow, becoming a living shadow, those were the powers that they trained her to use at the Academy.
    But she'd always been the best hider.
    Even now, there was a temptation to go into the shadows and never come out. The temptation came and went, but right now it was stronger than she could remember it being in ages.
    "Gah, getting emo in my old age," she snorted, then got back into the scramjet and started watching the drone reports.

    * * * *

    [January 9, 2027 - Berlin, Germany]

    "Come on, Anna, you'll miss it," Gerd shook his wife's shoulder.
    "It's just a sunrise," she mumbled, burying her face in a pillow. "Seen
    a bunch of 'em."
    "Yeah, but this is the first sunrise from our home!" Gerd gushed.
    They'd married over the summer and moved in together, a decent apartment in
    the city. Not so high that an elevator failure would strand them, but high enough that they could see sunrise. Well, for a few days a year, when the
    Sun shone down the street at the right angle. Otherwise, "sunrise" was when
    it cleared a building, rather than clearing the horizon.
    It had been cloudy the entire week in December when things lined up properly, but tonight it was crystal clear. You could even see some stars despite the city lights.
    "It's Saturday, a day for sleeping in, Herr Karstens," Anna mumbled, her tone suggesting she thought he wasn't living up to the adult title of "Herr". Then she rolled over, having given up on sleeping for the moment. "Fine.
    How long until dawn?"
    Gerd picked up his whitecel and checked. "Maybe fifteen minutes."
    Anna frowned. "Shouldn't the sky be brightening, then? It looks like
    the middle of the night out there."
    "Huh. You're right. Weird. Maybe the city light pollution is blocking us from seeing it?" he ventured uncertainly.

    Fifteen minutes later the Sun hadn't risen, the sky was still dark, and the city was in a panic....


    =============================================================================

    Next Issue:

    Night has come to stay! But is it only Berlin, or the whole world?
    Find out in ASH #121, "Nachtlicht"!

    =============================================================================

    Author's Notes:

    It's been over a year since #119, sorry about that. It turns out that unemployment may have given me plenty of time to write, but it sucked away a lot of the motiviation to write as well. It wasn't a totally empty year, for instance I wrote the LNH 2027 story referred to in the Radner scene, but I
    just stalled out on the main arc. I've since found gainful employment and gotten back on the horse, as it were. The main reason the delay ran past the point of getting caught up on work stuff is that I wanted to actually plot
    out the whole arc at least to some reasonable detail before writing any
    portion of it, so there's a month or so of planning time during which I
    wasn't posting anything. Hopefully I'll get through the rest of the way to #125 without any other hiatuses!

    One of the things that came with my new position was teaching a proper Astronomy course, instead of just a few weeks as part of a survey course.
    And in the process, I discovered the "Sunrise in the East" convention and realized I'd misread all the maps of Venus for years. Oops. The Noire scene was intended in part to address how the day-night lines I'd been writing were still correct, rather than trying to retcon all of the references to sunsets
    in the east and so forth. I decided that if I was going to start up the veneramagnetic dynamo via magical handwave, slightly changing the rotation of the planet at the same time was a much lower-order handwave and would
    preserve the stories as written.

    [Later note: I discovered while plotting out #122 that I'd accidentally changed M'emba to M'embe halfway through. I've fixed it, she's M'emba throughout now.]

    ============================================================================

    For all the back issues, plus additional background information, art,
    and more, go to http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/ASH !

    To discuss this issue or any others, either just hit "followup" to this post, or check out our Yahoo discussion group, which can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ash_stories/ !

    There's also a LiveJournal interest group for ASH, check it out at http://www.livejournal.com/interests.bml?int=academy+of+super-heroes (if
    you're on Facebook instead, there's an Academy of Super-Heroes group there too).

    ============================================================================

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  • From Drew Nilium@21:1/5 to Dave Van Domelen on Mon Nov 1 04:01:56 2021
    On 10/11/21 1:31 PM, Dave Van Domelen wrote:

    <snip>
    One possible consequence
    is that all of the unnaturalness of your collective existence will be transferred to a single person, who could gain power from it...or become the judas goat who dies to save the rest.

    o.o; Well.

    "Is that it?" someone in the crowd asked after the ritual had ended and silence had filled the hall for nearly a minute. "I don't feel any different...."
    Poniente nodded. "I was hoping there would be no dramatic results. We wished to gently ease you across the boundary, not smash through. It may be days or even weeks for changes to happen, and they will hopefully be so subtle they will feel natural."

    Oh. Good. o3o Anticlimax! X3

    Throughout the initially-tentative but strengthening celebrations that followed, M'emba accepted thanks and congratulations, but largely kept her own counsel. Secrets were something she had a lifetime of experience hiding, and she had a new one. The ceremony had kindled new power within her: not the power over storm and death that she had once wielded, but power nonetheless.
    But how could she have the power of a shaman when her dead gods had passed beyond death into total nonexistence?

    oooooooh fascinating. :o

    "Mmmm," Sharon sipped gratefully. "I am so glad your version of Earth has chocolate too. It would suck so bad if that was one of the holes in my memories...not only to have no chocolate, but to be unable to remember what it was even called!"

    D: Hell indeed!

    "There had to be a way to get godlike power without worshippers," Sharon
    interjected. "Like how our world-killer mad god went from mortal to godly by devouring realities." A shadow passed over her face at the recollection.
    The mad god had set in motion the end of all things when he set about devouring realities.
    "Exactly. These early godlings found a way to great power first, then got their faith batteries running later. There's several theories on how this happened, but Primal gods are those who scholars think managed to tap into some sort of fundamental principle of the universe," Tina explained.
    "Like death," Tom nodded.
    "Right. The 'portfolios' of the gods we know may well be a remnant of their origins as Primal gods, and those that lose worshippers are still strong if they can recall their connection to that source.

    ooooooooh, I see. :o That's a good expansion of the lore here.

    "Ah, gods running around making a mess," Sharon mused over her now half-empty second mug. "Starting to feel more like home all the time...."

    Heeheehee

    The Chancellor's
    quarters weren't quite as old-school luxurious as the palace in Monaco, but new-school luxury had its charms as well. Not that he would have minded a bare concrete room so long as he had the same company as snuggled up against him now.

    D'awwww.

    "How?" Angelique asked. "Amateur acting, decent visuals, but not much of a plot to it. Big monster shows up, heroes arrive and beat it down. All it was missing was bad dubbing from Japanese into English."
    "True, as entertainment it was pretty weak," Derek admitted. "But that was actually very good acting...if you realize that most of the characters were artificial intelligences." [As seen in LNH 2027 #1 - Ed.]

    DUN DUN DUNNNN!

    "Anyway, one thing I've been trying to get a handle on has been our AI program. Or programs. We have a lot of very unethical computer scientists playing around with leftover TwenCen AIs and alien tech, and the net is littered with what amount to giant monsters.

    Megavirus Monsters! :D

    Inspired by Heraclius's "children" and designed with help from Gimble, they would spread out and collect data, using microwave antennae to bounce signals off the planet's newly-formed ionosphere when a high-orbit satellite wasn't overhead.

    Neeeeeat. <3

    Moving from shadow to shadow, becoming a living
    shadow, those were the powers that they trained her to use at the Academy. But she'd always been the best hider.
    Even now, there was a temptation to go into the shadows and never come out. The temptation came and went, but right now it was stronger than she could remember it being in ages.
    "Gah, getting emo in my old age," she snorted, then got back into the scramjet and started watching the drone reports.

    Cuuuuuute. <3

    Fifteen minutes later the Sun hadn't risen, the sky was still dark, and the city was in a panic....

    DUN DUN DUNNNNNNNN!

    Hopefully I'll get through the rest of the way to
    #125 without any other hiatuses!

    I know that kind of declaration way too well. X3;

    I decided that if I was going to start up the
    veneramagnetic dynamo via magical handwave, slightly changing the rotation of the planet at the same time was a much lower-order handwave and would preserve the stories as written.

    That's the spirit! <3

    Drew "retcon early, retcon often" Nilium

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