Nuklear Age

by Clevinger, Brian

  Variel lowered his gaze to the Hero. Nuklear Man was suspended in mid-air and still in his Charge! pose.

  He looked up at Variel’s silvery eyes. “Gah! You’re even weirder lookin’ up close.”

  No response.

  “Hey, I was all flying at ya fast and stuff. What’s the deal, why haven’t I bashed you yet?”

  “This is why,” Variel’s inverse voice answered simply.

  Nuklear Man felt an incredible weight press down on him. “Ergh,” he uttered while trying to stay afloat. After about a second he was unable to mount much of an offensive against the invisible force. He slammed head-first into the already thoroughly beaten ground. “Ouff,” he grumbled through a face full of dirt.

  “I’m afraid, Arel, that you are going to find it difficult to defeat me when you cannot so much as move,” Variel unsaid.

  Nuklear Man’s body quivered in a failed attempt to stand.

  “I’ve been watching you. I know now that you can only access the smallest fraction of your true power at this time. And it’s not nearly enough to resist my dimensional powers. I have warped the space around you into an irresistible gravitational pull. Just relax. Lord Nihel will be along soon enough to transfer your star essence to me. And then I will have what I’ve always deserved. Equality. No longer relegated to the role of head slave. The heavens will bow to me. Fate will bend to my will.”

  Nuklear Man was able to turn his head to one side so he could speak. “What is with you guys and all this power stuff? I mean, I know I’m the strongest mo-fo on this rock and everything, and that everyone else on it is incredibly jealous of me but unable to act on said jealousy ‘cause they fear me even more than they envy me, but geez. You guys have really taken it to the extreme. Especially with this whole Using My Insignia thing. I’m serious about suing, you know.”

  Variel nongrumbled and pushed Nuklear Man deeper into the ground.

  “You’re only making it worse on yourself,” Nuklear Man grunted.

  Variel specifically pushed the Hero’s head down.

  “Ah! I’ve got dirt in my eye. Ow!” C’mon, let me up!”

  Nothing.

  “I’m not kidding, this hurts!” Still nothing. “Fine. Ouch, ouch, be that way!” Nuklear Man’s mighty arms shook with effort.

  Variel willed more gravity to oppress Nuklear Man.

  “I’m serious, this really hurts!” Nuklear Man said through clenched teeth. He had already managed to adopt a push up like position.

  Variel ungrowled. “I won’t let you escape! I’m too close. I will not endure Nihel’s heel any longer!” He shifted from the strain of exerting his spatial manipulations to their fullest extent.

  Nuklear Man’s Plazma Aura rippled and flared into an instant of perfected harmony. He shrugged off Variel’s shackles and stood. “Man,” he said and rubbed his eye. “That could’ve scratched my retina and permanently damaged my vision. You should be ashamed.” He blinked a few times and wiped away a tear. “Lucky for you, I’m darned invincible.” He jumped to a Plazma Beam charging pose. “But unlucky for you, I also happen to be darned invincible! Hoo-ah!”

  Variel unsighed. “It’s going to be a pleasure ripping your powers from you.”

  “It’ll be more of a pleasure for me to PLAZMAAA BEAM!” The beam wavered at Variel and twisted around him. It traveled on and blasted the hell out of the foreman’s abandoned office some distance behind him. “Hm,” Nuklear Man said. “That was unexpected.” He examined his hands. “No more screw ups, got it? Good. Now then. PLAZMAAA BEAM!”

  It wrapped around Variel and shot off to his right utterly obliterating a group of Port-a-Potties.

  “Are you quite finished?” Variel asked.

  “Well. Yeah, that’s about all I’ve got up my sleeves,” Nuklear Man said.

  “Glad to hear that you have come to your senses.” Variel raised one arm parallel with the ground, though it was hard to distinguish it from the rest of his voidness at Nuklear Man’s angle. He pointed at the Golden Guardian.

  A man-sized bubble appeared at the blackness of his finger. It was visible only by the effect that it played with the light traveling through it. The scenery on the other side looked like it was pinched through a lens that stretched images an infinite distance at the center.

  “Whoa, trippy,” Nuklear Man commented.

  “Isn’t it?” Variel unasked. The sphere shot to Nuklear Man. It made a continuous tearing noise, like a thunder crack that wouldn’t quite finish, as it rushed through the air. It struck Nuklear Man. He felt his body curve itself inside out and back again. It was like becoming a Picasso painting. The sphere pulsed and disappeared. Nuklear Man fell to one knee. He felt like most of his internal organs had been rearranged with a rusty chainsaw.

  “So that was the most painful thing ever,” he groaned while barely holding on to consciousness.

  “No,” Variel unanswered. “But you’ll wish it had been.”

  Nuklear Man’s body floated but not by his will. His limbs hanged limply and his face was twisted in agony.

  “You see, Arel. That was merely what happens when a body of normative space is intersected by more dimensions than it was ever intended to.”

  “Let’s not do that again,” Nuklear Man weakly pleaded as Variel drew him closer to his blackness.

  “Don’t worry, we won’t.”

  “Oh, that’s good.”

  “Instead, we shall see what happens when a body of normative space travels into null space, a dimension without dimension. No beginning, without even existence itself.” Nuklear Man hung in mid-air mere inches from Variel’s implausible body. “If this doesn’t kill you, it’ll at least serve as an impenetrable prison for you until Lord Nihel arrives. Nothing can escape it. Not even your power, for there is nothing from which to escape.”

  Nuklear Man squirmed in resistance. The idea was to throw a mountain-breaking punch or two, but the majority of the effort was lost somewhere along the way. Instead, Nuklear Man floated straight into the depths of Variel’s voidness and was gone.

  __________

  Atomik Lad was vaguely aware of himself floating in a sea of darkness. His first reaction was to lose this awareness and slip back into the warm embrace of sweet, sweet sleep. Unfortunately, in the final moments of his vague awareness, he became more aware that he was sitting up which served only to further sharpen his awareness in general.

  Take for instance: he became aware of other bodies with him in the darkness. That wasn’t normal.

  And then there were his hands to think about. All bound at the wrist and tied up behind the back of his chair. That wasn’t normal by a whole lot.

  The darkness was attacked by a gang of miscreant light rays from the wall that he turned out to be facing. He cringed and looked away to bide time for his eyes to recover from the light speed assault.

  “Is my aura of power too much for your minds to comprehend?” a rasping wheeze of a voice said from somewhere in the vicinity of the blinding wall of light.

  “What?” Norman asked from the ex-sidekick’s left.

  “Ah’ll show ye an aura of power,” Angus grumbled from in front of him.

  “Hai,” Shiro said, sounding as if he and Angus were right next to each other.

  Atomik Lad chanced another look at the light wall. He had to squint and it still hurt his head. The wall was a collection of small gray and white screens that looked down at storefronts all over the Mall’s bowels. Happy shoppers walked into and out of their frames in a maddening web of movement. He began to see meaning in the chaos. One shopper leaves a Shoe Junction as another enters a Frame Junction and yet another pauses in front of a Pet Junction—it was clear now. The Mall, laws of conservation of consumers, universal constants of sales, coefficients of returns, a microcosm of all reality. Every cog working in perfect symmetry with every other piece of the great machine without any one element having the slightest concept of its place in the larger scheme of Being!

  But it was probably jus
t the ether talking.

  He could make out a humanoid silhouette in the middle of the wall of light-epiphanies. It was sitting down behind a huge desk and seemed absurdly frail, the skull was far too large for the neck that supported it. He turned to his right. Rachel was there, tied to a chair just like Norman and himself.

  Which isn’t to say that Angus and Shiro weren’t tied, because they were. It’s just that they were each strapped to small brightly colored plastic chairs. The kind a little girl would use at a tea party. Atomik Lad fixed his attention on them for a few seconds while his mind tried to reconcile what it was being told. Namely: Shiro was wearing a tuxedo while Angus was wearing a white dress. They looked like some sort of wedding cake decoration gone horribly, horribly wrong. He turned to Norman and whispered, “Did I miss something?” with a nod to their diminutive compatriots.

  “Silence!” the voice barked. Or wheezed. But it was a mean-hearted wheeze, you can be sure of that. The wraith-like figure rose and leaned on its desk. “Brave souls you may be, but the fool’s path has brought you here.”

  “What’s he talking about?” Rachel asked.

  “Such insolence,” he whisper-wheezed. Mort shambled from behind his desk, always certain to keep one frail hand on it for support, and shakily made his way to Rachel. He leaned way too close for her taste.

  “You ever hear of a Circle of Comfort?” she said while trying to keep the maximum possible distance between herself and Mort even though she was tied to a chair.

  “Yes. But I am quite immune to such trifles.” He traced one skeletal finger across her jawline.

  Rachel nearly fell back from yanking her head from him quickly. “Get away from me, you letch!”

  Can’t kill insane old man. Can’t kill insane old man, Atomik Lad repeated to himself. He channeled his aggression into struggling against the restraints at his wrists. They were already beginning to loosen.

  The old man shuffled back to his desk. His body wavered from the strain of standing. “Don’t you know who I am?” he asked with a gleeful hint to his wheeze.

  “One soon to be dead old man?” Angus guessed with a snarl.

  “I am Mort Dakainen! Also known as the Mall Wizard. You know, because I’ve set up so many malls across the nation. Tremble before my power!”

  Atomik Lad struggled, struggled, struggled. “So you own the mall. Big deal.”

  “You pathetic little adventurer. You cannot hope to grasp so much as a fraction of the power at my command. I built this tower, this unholy blight upon unspoilt land. I drew in the townsfolk, made them think they needed me, and then one day, one fateful day, they believed it. My spells, composed of catchy slogans, Limited Time Only Sales, and New and Improved Products That Make Life Easy, they were to lure the townsfolk into my clutches. But there was one more ingredient. Time. Muwa. Muwa hahahahahawheeeeeeze.”

  “This guy’s out of his gourd,” Norman said.

  “Am I?” Mort asked. “Or am I the only sane man alive?”

  “I’d have to go with that first one, Mort,” Atomik Lad answered. His video game strengthened fingers worked their voodoo on the ropes around his wrists.

  “Bah! Madness is a label the meek use to categorize that which they do not understand. I have a loyal army of monsters at my disposal. Yes, monsters I say, for one could no longer call them truly human. These are but mere beasts driven by greed and pride. And they are my pets. My wonderful, wonderful pets. But they are also your neighbors. My eager little pawns. And they brought you here to my tower, oh brave adventurers.”

  Atomik Lad had nearly freed his hands. Keep talking old man. I’m almost there.

  “You are not the first party of hardy souls to invade my keep, oh no,” Mort continued. “There have been many who attempted to rush into my treasure troves to steal what they may. But always, yes always, my faithful monsters deliver these poor wretches unto me.”

  There was an audible snapping sound as Rachel’s patience reached its limits. “What are you talking about, you insane old fuck!” It was not panic. It was the perfect clarity of anger. “What the hell are you holding us for, you wrinkled bastard! Let me outta this chair and I’ll rip your lungs out through your ass!”

  Her comrades all shirked before her might and even Angus caught himself thanking the Benevolent Incarnation of Whisakey that she wasn’t talking to him.

  “Such indignation!” Mort wheezed like thunder. “You dare feign ignorance, as though you did not come here specifically to usurp the throne to my most dread empire of doom?”

  “What the hell!” Rachel yelled.

  A spotlight shone down onto Mort’s desk. The toy weapons, Rachel’s ATM money, the Turbo Fighter game, and Book of Magic Instruction were bathed in a cool luminescence. “You were all stealing my treasures!” Mort accused in a wheeze. “And you, my fiery one,” he spun to Rachel. “You traversed the Forbidden Tunnels.” The televisions tuned into one wall-sized image of Rachel and Atomik Lad scurrying through the air conditioning vents. “You must pay, all of you, for your crimes here today. And pay you shall, the same as those who have come before you—with your eternal souls fueling my continued unlife!”

  “Mort is person of the thing that hungries dead?” Shiro asked.

  “Why of course,” Mort wheezed. “How do you think I survived these many, many years?”

  “Let me get this straight,” Rachel said. “You’re not actually alive?”

  “Correct. It’s the result of a ritual I learned from a Tome of Everyday Magic I picked up in one of my treasure keeps some time ago. It involves Zombie King blood. Very messy.”

  “Yeah, right,” she scoffed. “Prove it.”

  “Heh. Certainly.” He picked up the Li’l Warrior’s foam sword that Norman had been using. “Behold!” he announced and plunged the blade deep into his breast. “Conventional weapons cannot harm me! I am immortal! I have inside me blood of Zombie Kings! No man can be my equal!”

  “It’s just a toy sword, dude” Norman said. “You couldn’t harm a fly with that thing.”

  “Ha!” Mort wheeze-coughed. “Your deceit shan’t beguile me. I watched with mine own eyes as you struck down a score of my fiercest monsters with but this very blade.”

  Atomik Lad stopped messing with the rope around his wrists. “Screw this. You picked the wrong party of adventurers to mess with, old man.”

  “For your insolence, you shall be the first to be consumed,” Mort wheezed menacingly.

  “Okay.” Atomik Flames engulfed the ex-sidekick. His chair met an untimely and splintered demise.

  Mort immediately sat down with his head held low. A pencil materialized in his skeletal hand as he scribbled in a notepad. “But in light of your heartfelt apology, I hereby release you all.”

  Atomik Lad’s Field vanished. “Thanks,” he said and went about releasing his friends.

  __________

  Nuklear Man was used to breaking the commonly held laws of physics. He did it with a kind of clockwork regularity that one wouldn’t expect to find in your average physics defying behavior. And he broke those laws with such force that even the most brilliant scientific minds on Earth had to abandon their comforting theories and grudgingly accept what had previously been assumed to be just plain wrong, Kopelson’s Intrinsity Model of reality.

  Kopelson’s First Law. Everything that exists within a system has a tendency to be itself. This fairly straightforward point explains why things like apples don’t suddenly turn into things like cars or orangutans. This is a very convenient state of affairs for things like humans because it keeps reality stable enough to survive in it.

  However, Kopelson’s First Law also explained Nuklear Man’s current torment. He had been forced into a realm of nonexistence. No space, no time, nothing outside himself. It was somewhat like being squeezed through a subatomic hole for all eternity. The pain was something that mere words could not convey and I’m sorry for it. He could not help but exist within this realm of Nothing and it ripped at him with the f
ury of his insult of his mere existence.

  His mind reeled to escape from being cut by the razors of unbeing. Images. Strangely familiar, yet tauntingly alien. Wolves with coats of flame. The vast emptiness of some infinite cosmic crevice and the threat of those that call it home. “…Allies of madness, cut their own throats as soon as their foes. This is what Fate would have us fight beside…?”

  Familiar voices, whispering. Plotting.

  …What has been written will be burned in his flames. The fire of every star in every sky…the Flames of “Arel!” He screamed it into the great Nothing. It was a voice of will, not sound. It shattered the Nothingness with a wake of fire. Nuklear Man was the all-burning, all-radiant center of the universe.

  He breathed fire.

  Variel’s eyes shone with a golden radiance. His body jerked the same way it might if a stranger tapped on his shoulder while he’d been showering. He spun this way and that, looking for…he didn’t know. And then he crumpled over like a meal’s worth of bad oysters had begun their insidious assault on his innards. One black hand held onto his gut, the other gripped the ground to support his unmass. His eyes were an iridescent yellow-white.

  “No!” his nonvoice said in wavering tones. “He…he cannot. Not even the Lords could escape my….” And then it occurred to him

  Nihel and Arel had made Variel and the others. Had given each a form and power. Had given Variel favor above the others. But never, never would they have given him any power over them. “It was a lie,” Variel unwhispered. His dreams of equality were vaporized.

  Cracks of light raced across his depthless body like veins of energy. He was a patchwork quilt of darkness stitched by threads of light. And then he was devoured into himself, and Nuklear Man stood in his stead. He smoked slightly.

  “Man, I just knew I’d get a headache.”

  __________

  Issue 54 – Victory, Lunch, and Murder!

  Arel, Arel, Arel. What do you see in this world?

  Nihel walked on air. He walked among high-rises and skyscrapers. His cape, a red so dark it flirted with the idea of being a livid shadow, waltzed itself in the winds that flew through the alleys of the sky.