[MV] The Super Wizard From Space #25: To Hell And Hell And Hell And Hell And Hell And Back Again, Part 1

[Wil Alambre]

Sharp super-lightening split across a sick dry sky as a lone yellow cab
pulled up in front of a long abandoned university. Treadless tires
crunched on neglected cobblestones that had not yet lost the fight
against the invading wild grass that used to be a pristine lawn. The car
rolled up to the main entrance of the windowless structure. The
brickwork crumbling, the roof collapsing, the aggressive truffula trees
and vines simultaneously pulling and pushing against it.

The pale driver scratched at his unkept beard. Hunched over the steering
wheel, he got a better look through the windshield at the derelict
campus. "You sure this is where you wanna to be?" he gruffly asked the
passenger in the back seat.

"For the last time, yes, I'm damn sure," was the exasperated reply from
the thin red man in the back seat. He was dressed in a black tuxedo with
an opera cape over his sharp shoulders, and had a moustache and goatee
that ended with a very slight but deliberate twists. He placed a top hat
on his greasy hair and a domino mask on his pointed face. "Stay here and
keep the meter running. I won't be long."

The driver muttered a derisive comment under his breathe, but put the
car in park.

The thin man climbed out of the car and, negotiating some fallen wooden
beams and a spectacularly overgrown hedge, managed to get inside the
building. There was no light inside, any lamps long extinguished,
smashed, or stolen. White gloved fingers snapped, and a small flame
danced at the end of his thumb. A flickering light was cast across
books. Piles and piles and piles of books.

They were of every size and shape, from old musty tomes to ragged tossed
pamphlets. They were stacked madly against the walls, on the floor,
leaning crazily against themselves, in many cases the only things
keeping the rotting walls up. The deeper he went, the more there were.
Layers upon layers of them, until the remains of the university were
completely obscured by them, leaving only a claustrophobic cavern of
books.

He paused at one that lay open and saw the pages were blank. Flipping
through it, he found all the pages that way. He randomly chose another
book, he discovered the same thing. Blank pages. Every book, every page,
and not a single word on any of them.

With a shiver, he knew that he was in the right place.

"It is indecorous of diminutive vigilantes to obtrude," a whisper came
over cracking thunder.

The books under the thin man's feet shunted, starting an avalanche of
leather and paper and cardboard. He lost his balance and tumbled down a
sinkhole. The fall snuffed the fragile flame. 

He didn't so much reach the bottom as slide into it, banged against
stacks of softcovers that curved into a horizontal surface of ripped
pages and torn covers. It was dark. He was disoriented. No idea how far
he had fallen. Hard to get a footing on all the loose paper. An ancient
dryness to the air that scratched his throat as he breathed.

He felt the presence. All around him. In the dark somewhere, leaking out
from conceptual places, slipping between the thin angles of splayed open
spines. 

They say some ideas have a momentum, that some stories have a life of
their own. They seem to forget that life is usually an ugly, brutal
thing. They never warn you about the malevolence it can have.

"I postulate it is not fortuitous circumstance you are in attendance.
What is your intendment at this locus?" asked the whisper, sticky in
sound.

"You're right, naturally," the thin man answered. "I came here looking
for you."

"How did you descry my cloister?"

He felt the weight of the words, the air weakly echoing them, like it
couldn't support its mass. The speech was both product and person, a
presence and a result of it. "I... heard rumours of an empty corner of
the universe. One that used to be lush with civilizations and learning,
so much so that they formed a galactic university. And after
space-centuries of research and experimentation, their bio-philosophers
had succeeded in gestating an Idea so primal that it could exist
independent of any self or being.

"But these rumours, they say these great civilizations then became
insular, became isolated. They gave up all their achievements and
regressed. That they lost their culture, shunned their sciences,
abandoned their arts, and even forgot how to speak..."

"Not forgotten! Taken!" bellowed the words with predatory pride.
"Plagiarized and masticated! A feast of lexeme that I gorged up!
Absorbing apperception, discarding the meaningless! I was voracious and
coveted multifarious attainments. I arrogated every integer, every
idiom, every concept and phrase they reserved and desiderated
entireties.  

"A thousand different civilizations. Their acculturation, their
edification, their vocabularies, now mine! Mine alone! A symbiotic
component of the Secret Living Language!"

"Well," the thin man said, trying to get his footing in the dark, "not
so secret now, I suppose."

The weight of the words lifted away for a moment, like a hand pulled
back in shock, then came slamming back down at him. The Idea so fierce
and fully formed that it threatened to steamroll him. His mind laboured
over its thoughts as his lungs laboured to breathe. "I have
punctiliously administered this recondite residence for inestimable
epochs. How did you espy hermetical burrow?"

"The dead... the dead told me..." he choked out. Just as he was certain
he was going to get crushed, the Idea softened. It lightened, became
pliable. The thin man gasped and coughed on the stale air. 

"Elucidate," it demanded from everywhere.

"I'm offended. I was certain my infamy had reached even this far." There
was no response, only a growing dread. With a disappointed sigh, the
thin man removed his top hat and peeled the domino mask from his face.
He noted with a small smirk that he could dimly make out them out. "I am
renowned as a two-fisted crime-fighter, but in my alternate identity, I
am equally famous as... the Devil! And though you have caused the
extinction of worlds to keep your lair here hidden, there are no secrets
in Hell."

The feeling of dread circled around him. His eyes were adjusting to the
faintness, occasionally catching the Idea rolling around in the
cluttered space. "Then I've a peremptory urgency to extirpate you in
advance of you admeasuring this cipher en masse."

"Pfft! A little late for that." He held up his hands, his gloves fairly
clear in the growing light. "I only wanted one other person to find this
place, and he doesn't even have to talk to me to do it."

The light grew brighter, the source coming from behind and above. The
piles started to shiver, loose pages fluttered in a lifting breeze.
There was a rising heat in the air, a crackling spark in the long
dryness.

"...you see, his star-instruments alert him the moment I gain access to
this mortal realm."

The brightness grew blinding, invading the buried place through the
stacked volumes. The dry air cracked. Leather and paper and cardboard
caught fire. Collapsing piles collapsed other piles, the walls of books
falling away in light and flickering flames. The Super Wizard From Space
marched down a long buried set of marble steps, making great sweeping
motions with his arms that sent millions of blank tomes flying away in
tearing, burning tidal waves.

The Idea fragmented in surprise, falling in between the spaces left. The
Devil felt its ragged concepts pull out of his mind, felt the presence
slide off his skin. It even dragged the memory of itself out, hiding
itself ins the metaphors of the room's sharp corners. He knew it was
there, but if it ever had a shape or a face or a form, it had stolen
that for itself.

The Devil stood up, brushing dust, dirt, and fire off his tuxedo jacket.
"Finally. I thought you'd never get here." 

A fast cross. A blast of pain. The taste of copper. Knocked to the
floor. His jaw ached. His cheek had that hot blistered feeling to it.

"Last we met, You and your kind were victims of your own convoluted
manipulations," said the wizard flatly, his fists searing brightly with
star-power.

"Caught in my own trap, you mean," the Devil said, spitting out a bloody
tooth. "Call it what it is. I've had too much of a wordy day already."

"Why have you come back?"

The Devil chortled, "Isn't is obvious? I'm here because you need me!"

.........................................

AUTHORS NOTES

The main problem with making most of this up as you go is that when 
you eventually do get around to setting up an ongoing plot, you find
that you've already sabotaged it. For example, I didn't really come up
with the idea of the cosmic crowns and their importance in the
tournament until around issue six of this series. 

The advantage, on the flip side, is that it is relative easy to make 
plot changes on the fly. The Gavrilo arc was supposed to be only two
issues originally, with the Hermit Wizard living at the end. The Monster
Bees didn't figure into it until literally the end of issue six, when I
tossed them in for the hell of it.

I'm okay with that sort of loose scripting because that was one of the
"rules" I set for this series when I started it. I try not to take it 
too seriously, neither the material nor the process. Its a learning 
experience and I have to be willing to make mistakes.

One mistake was the addition of Queen Buzz, Emperor M, and The Secret
Living Language to the story arcs on Planet Amenity. They didn't 
really add anything to the story and I kept tripping over them when 
trying to get action moving, so I just ended up ignoring them. The
Secret Living Language in particular was pretty flat, no personality. 
I'm not going to pretend the character is amazingly three-dimensional 
now, but its now more interesting than just a wacky concept with 
verbose dialogue.

Writing that damn dialogue is *really* annoying, by the way :P

With the return of a fan-favorite character (okay, maybe just one of
*my* favorite characters), I decided to put a little more effort. I
did some light research and made some more purposeful choices in
scenes and descriptions... the piles blank books for example, a nod to
the classic scene of the monster's cave full of the picked-clean bones
of its meals.

I am expecting this series to run four issues total. Maybe five? I want
to get better at judging this sort of thing.

.........................................
Wil Alambre, follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/wilalambre