A Once Crowded Sky
Page 23
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STAR-KNIGHT: It’s the belt.
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PANEL 2: Star-Knight’s face, blue in his tears.
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STAR-KNIGHT: He wore my stupid belt when he died.
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PANEL 3: Star-Knight’s face, blue in tears.
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STAR-KNIGHT: And my belt is strong. With all those powers in it, it’s strong. It didn’t burn like him. It’s still there. All our powers still in it.
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PANEL 4: Star-Knight’s face, blue in tears.
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STAR-KNIGHT: It’s there, buried in the last of The Blue. But we can’t get it. No one can touch it. The hole is still open. The Blue burns around it. If we reach for it, we burn away. If only we could close the hole, if only there was someone still powerful enough to close it.
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PANEL 5: Star-Knight’s face, blue in tears.
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STAR-KNIGHT: It’s a parable. It’s about the boy who didn’t show. About the power he still has.
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PANEL 6: Star-Knight’s face, blue in tears.
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STAR-KNIGHT: The power needed to close the hole. In you, it’s in you, Pen.
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PANEL 7: Star-Knight’s face, blue in tears.
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STAR-KNIGHT: You want to get the powers back so we can all pick up our arms again and go to battle—you want that? That’s easy. Go to The Blue. Put yourself in its stream, pull it closed. Let it consume you, like it did him. Reveal the belt. Release the powers.
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PANEL 8: Star-Knight’s face, blue in tears.
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STAR-KNIGHT: But you should know, it’ll be too much. You’ll die in the effort. You’ll burn away in The Blue so we can all come back. Just like he did.
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PANEL 9: Star-Knight’s face, blue in tears. We now see Pen in the tears. Pen’s hands are gripped around the gash that is The Blue, and he’s yanking it closed, as Ultimate did.
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STAR-KNIGHT: That’s what it says in the book. That’s our story. First Ultimate, then his boy, dying to save us.
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PAGE 19
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PANEL 1: Back in the office with Pen and Star-Knight on either side.
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PEN: Bull$#%&.
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PANEL 2: Close-up on Pen’s face.
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PEN: You would’ve told me. All this time, all this suffering—you would’ve told me.
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PANEL 3: Wide shot. Pen and Star-Knight on either side.
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STAR-KNIGHT: I loved Ultimate. I loved him. He was the best of us. There was no one better.
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STAR-KNIGHT: He saved the world again and again. He saved me again and again. And he asked for one thing. One thing!
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STAR-KNIGHT: I protected his boy. I gave everything to protect his boy.
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PANEL 4: Close up on Star-Knight’s face.
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STAR-KNIGHT: I buried what was left of The Blue. Hid it. Threatened Prophetier with his life not to reveal what had happened, not to ever look for it again. I even built the damn graveyard over it. Where we put the villains. Because I knew you, Pen. You didn’t want a reminder. You’d never go there. Not you.
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PANEL 5: Flash to a picture of Star-Knight and Ultimate facing the audience, arms around each other, together in better times, as if they’re posing for a picture. Star-Knight is smiling; Ultimate is stoic.
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STAR-KNIGHT: I hid it. Because I loved him. He was the goddamn best of us.
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PANEL 6: Closer in on Ultimate’s face. We still see Star-Knight beside him, still posed and smiling.
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STAR-KNIGHT: I loved him, and I told him how to die.
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PANEL 7: Close in on Ultimate. Star-Knight’s arm hangs over his shoulder. Ultimate looks out at the audience.
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STAR-KNIGHT: And all he wanted was for you to live.
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PANEL 8: Medium shot, back to the office. Star-Knight on the floor.
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STAR-KNIGHT: I don’t know what this threat is. I don’t know what’s causing it. But I know I can fight it, I can defeat it without you dying. Without books. Without powers. His boy doesn’t die because I’m too weak! Not Ultimate’s boy. I owe him that.
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PANEL 9: Close in now on Star-Knight.
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STAR-KNIGHT: You don’t want this, Pen. You don’t want this sacrifice. It’s not what he wanted. It’s not what anyone wants.
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STAR-KNIGHT: Stay with your wife, Pen. Stay with your lovely wife.
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PAGE 20
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Four identical horizontal panels.
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PANEL 1: Pen, Star-Knight, facing each other against a black background.
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PEN: They all come back.
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PEN: They all have to come back.
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PANEL 2: Stat.
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STAR-KNIGHT: No, Pen, no.
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PANEL 3: Stat.
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PEN: I can’t fight this on my own. I’m not good enough. I need help. For Anna. The heroes have to get their powers back, and they have to fight.
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STAR-KNIGHT: No, Pen, no.
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PEN: I die, and they all come back.
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PANEL 4: Stat.
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PEN: They all come back.
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PAGE 21
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One image. Pen is at the center. He is standing, and he looks stoic, peaceful, resolved. And around him are dozens of images of Pen drawn from the entire story line.
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—Pen rescuing Strength
—Pen drunk in The Metal Room
—Pen digging a dead body out of a car
—Pen holding his wife in his arms
—Pen and his wife making the bed
—Pen flying behind Ultimate
—Pen eyeing the metal cat
—Pen rushing toward a man, the crack following him
—Pen (in costume) his arm looped over Starry
—Pen sleeping next to his wife
—Pen and Soldier fighting in the diner
—Pen (in costume) swooping behind Ultimate
—Pen again holding his wife
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PEN: I don’t care what anyone does—about any of this. I’m going to do it. For her. For Anna. I’m going to get the powers back. Nothing will stop that. If I have to die, I don’t care. Whatever happens, whatever it takes, I’m going to come back.
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PEN: We’re all going to come back.
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PAGE 22
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Just two images, each half a page.
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PANEL 1: Star-Knight and Pen on the floor, a grin on Star-Knight’s face, but also tears in his eyes, again blue tears.
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STAR-KNIGHT: You sound almost like him.
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PANEL 2: Ultimate standing above Pen back at the mansion, the first time, when he asked Pen to join him. He towers above the boy, but the boy looks back, defiant.
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PEN: I don’t know. I don’t know about that.
Pen closes the book, places it back down on the floor near the shards of glass. His hands are dotted with blue ink, which now purples his bloody palms. Star-Knight remains unconscious across the office. He kept his promise. He never said a word. Outside, a wind rumbles against the windows, starting up a clattering that goes
on for a while.
1
The Prophetier Origin Special #2 of 2
Everyone knows Ultimate’s origin. It’s been retold into cliché. The mad scientist molds metal into man, activates an energy meant to animate his steel statue; but in that moment of creation, the instant the spark becomes life, something explodes, something cracks blue, the scientist is killed right as his greatest feat, The Man With The Metal Face, rises from the table.
Everyone likes that story; they like telling it, and they tell it often, and they tell it well, though they do tend to leave out the boy’s mother. His mother too died that day, but no one ever mentions it. Also it wasn’t an explosion that killed them. In fact, there wasn’t any explosion at all.
Still though, best to start with the father. You see, the boy’s father had been working for decades on building a robot man. He’d gotten rather far along in the process, but was having trouble finding a power source capable of sustaining the thing, of transforming all that sculpted metal into something that might benefit mankind, a robot to explore space or do our farming or whatever was the man’s most recent fantasy.
His father’s last test was judged to have no more potential than the hundreds that had preceded it. As the boy understands it, as men had long ago split atoms of space to produce nuclear energy, his father split an atom of time, releasing a wave of nonlinear energy he optimistically calculated would perpetually move the great metal man.
His father performed the experiment in his lab, which was a small shack in their backyard—he’d long ago been rather forcefully ejected from any legitimate institution due to his rather odd ambitions. After the test, the robot man remained, as usual, inert, and the boy’s father left, only to discover a few hours later what a success he’d finally achieved when the well-powered Man With The Metal Face woke and killed him. And, obviously, his wife. We mustn’t forget the boy’s mother. Not again.
The boy saw it of course. He’d already been tucked into bed, but he’d snuck out of his room that night. A Superman comic clutched in one hand and a blanket in the other, the boy was determined to get his dad to read him this one more story before he went to sleep. He was only a few feet behind them, watching them quarrel over nothing, when the metal man burst through the wall, screaming, demanding something, and when he didn’t get what he wanted, flinging his metal fists right through the boy’s parents.
The boy gasped, and the robot man turned. Prophetier remembers well the metal face, the eyes focusing in and out, clicking and whirling. The robot stepped toward the boy, and the robot screamed; he screamed and screamed, and it took some time for the boy to understand what the words were.
“Explain me!” the robot yelled. “Explain me!”
And the robot neared the boy, and the boy saw his parents’ bodies reflected in the metal, the image smudged behind a few streaks of blood.
The boy should’ve broken. All that violence. His parents gone forever. It should’ve broken him forever. But he knew better. He wasn’t stupid. He knew this is just what happens sometimes. In fact, it happens all the time. It does, it really does. In the comic book stories. And the boy knew those stories well.
The boy adored comic books in all their endless glory. From before he could read, the boy would sit on his father’s lap flipping through another one, explaining to his father why this particular muscleman was beating upon this particular bald man. The boy’s father rarely left his work, but when he did, they’d pass the hours this way, enjoying the stories revealed in the funny books, stories of suspense and adventure, death and resurrection.
The boy understood these stories. It wasn’t so hard. Why his parents were dead on the other side of the room. He understood. What else could it be?
Remember Batman’s parents. Superman’s parents. Robin’s parents. Captain America’s parents. Spider-Man’s parents. Iron Man’s parents. The Thing’s parents. Hawkeye’s parents. Magneto’s parents. Daredevil’s parents. Green Lantern’s parents. And on and on. Parents die, that happens, that’s when the adventure begins.
When the boy saw his parents, saw his world crushed beneath the metal, one might imagine he feared that it was all a fiction, that all stories amount to nothing, all that love and energy spent had no explanation beyond inevitable death; but, no, not for one second did the boy hesitate or think any of that.
The boy remembered the stories, and he knew that his parents’ death was rebirth, their fall was the ascendancy of a new story. “Explain me!” the metal man shouted at the boy. “Explain me!”
And the boy stretched out his arm, offered the comic book to the metal man. “You’re a story,” the boy said, and the metal man stopped and for a moment stood still and silent. Then the metal man cocked his arm, but the boy wasn’t scared, and the metal man grabbed the colored, crumpled paper from the boy’s hand and launched into the sky, flying away into a dark blue night.
The metal man left the boy alone. But the boy wasn’t worried. He’d come back. The boy’s parents lay dead, and they died for a reason. The boy knew the stories. They all come back. That’s the rule.
And indeed the boy saw The Man With The Metal Face only a few minutes later. Peering through the new hole in his house, the boy began to notice a blue glow humming in the backyard, coming from where his father’s lab once stood. The boy stepped over his parents’ bodies, walked outside, and bent over the dirt, which now bubbled blue. And the boy scratched a circle around the glow, releasing a stream of light.
Later, when he could see all the stories, the boy would understand what had happened. His father’s experiment had cut into the fabric of time, releasing the energy that powered Ultimate. Like in all these types of things, it had something to do with Einstein’s unified theory and dead cats that are alive and all the rest of that incredible, typical stuff. But that’s not too important. What is essential is that this experiment had cut a hole in our universe, an incandescent gash leaking time, spitting out a stream of energy that contained the infinite images of the future.
Of course no one could comprehend the totality of what was actually flooding out of the rip; instead the color was shaped by the perceiver, whose unconscious mind sought out the images of relevance among that cacophony of reality. Some people would have seen their parents, their friends, or even their future life, its love and loss; the boy, of course, saw The Man With The Metal Face. He saw the robot flying again and again out of a blue sky, wearing a cape like the one from the comic the boy’d given him. And next to Ultimate, tucked close to that metal skin, stood a boy not unlike our boy, gleefully shouting, “Time to feel our metal!!!”
Pen was there. PenUltimate served by Ultimate’s side as the faithful, awesome sidekick. As in the boy’s story, Ultimate had come to Pen, had killed Pen’s parents, but instead of abandoning him, Ultimate pulled that boy closer, taught him how to be part of the myth, how to put the good above all else.
And if PenUltimate could do it, if he could come back from all that seemingly meaningless tragedy, then the boy too could rise. He too could be a hero. Of all the fantasies, which other could possibly be his favorite? He collected Pen’s stories, poured over them, memorized them, recognized that the boy was him, he was the boy, riding the clouds, The Man With The Metal Face always at his side.
The boy grew and watched the stories come true as the fictions claimed the skies above. First Ultimate emerged, soaring, inspiring others. Then Star-Knight came. And PenUltimate, the real, in the flesh and wires, PenUltimate! He emerged from the stories in the spout, and he joined the thousands of heroes saturating the world with their adventures.