Shiori reached up to grab the Red Specter’s lighter, only to have the Specter display a surge of strength—not enough to break free, but he managed to pull the lighter out of Shiori’s reach. Shiori rolled her eyes and tried to grab it again, but the Specter did the same thing, and again until he was waving his whole arm back and forth in the air, just managing to keep her from getting it.
Shiori crossed her arms and glared. “Well, now you’re just being childish. You realize I’ve got a whole world to conquer, here? I’ve got better things to do than stand around playng silly games with—”
Shiori’s eyes went wide, and for the first time, her face showed an expression of sheer terror.
“HEEEEEERRRE POCHI-POCHI-POCHI-POCHI-POCHI…”
“NO! No, Pochi-kun, no playtime now, no… oh crap!”
Shiori dived to one side, gas jets from her feet shooting her along like a rocket, as Pochi spit a stream of molten fire into the massed army of gas monsters, and the Zalandag town square exploded into an inferno.
Dr. Zhang’s crew huddled down from their safe distance, trying to peer at the flames without being blinded. About twenty yards away, Shiori sprawled in the dirt. Her stiletto heels had caught fire, so she kicked them off and stamped her bare feet in the dirt. Pochi landed on her shoulder and licked her face.
Shiori grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and waved a finger at him. “No, no, no! Bad Pochi! Bad! Mommy’s very, very angry. No treats for a week!”
The baby dragon stared at her with huge, liquid eyes. Shiori scowled, but allowed him to perch on her shoulder again. “Being cute won’t make up for destroying my entire army, so don’t think I’ve let you off for that. But it’s not all bad. At least you got rid of him, didn’t you? That persistent thorn in my side, that menace who’s foiled every single one of my plans, that pompous, dour, self-righteous meddler, that fool in a mask who calls himself—
“Red Specter!” cried Lilla, her expression joyous.
“What? Impossible!” Shiori turned back to the town square. Most of the gas had burned off in the initial fireball, leaving smaller bonfires of burning debris in its aftermath. Visible in largest, central fire was a black silhouette. This dark core of the bonfire stirred, struggled to its hands and knees, and staggered to its feet. It took one step forward, then another, a man-shaped phoenix.
"No," the witch gasped, shrinking away. "The heat from that explosion was… it's impossible! No one could survive that. Not even you. This can't be happening. This isn't real."
But it was. The Red Specter advanced on her, step by step, as the flames diminished and went out. And the Red Specter stood there unharmed, with barely a scorch mark on his trench coat.
"What are you?" she breathed. She held up a hand to point at him, or maybe ward him off, and the artist put a bunch of wavy lines around her hand to show how badly it was shaking. She wasn’t laughing this off. "Why won't you die? What does it take to kill you? WHY WON'T YOU DIE?"
“DO YOU WANT TO KNOW?” The Red Specter intoned. “DO YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW THAT? BECAUSE I CAN SHOW YOU. I CAN SHOW YOU TERRORS OF THE COSMOS THAT DRIVE MOST MEN INSANE.”
The Specter brandished his odd composite spear at her, and she staggered to her feet and backed away, unwilling to even try to use her Caliburn combat skills against him, for what good would it do?
“No—stay away! Stay back,” she said.
“JUDGMENT COMES FOR US ALL. JUDGMENT IS INESCAPABLE. NOW YOU FACE YOURS,” said the Specter, closing the distance between them.
“Is that right?” said Shiori. “I wonder just how committed you are to your ‘Judgment.’ Enough to let an innocent die? Let’s test that, shall we?”
She pulled out one final black urn, the smallest one yet, and hurled it to strike Lilla Zhang full in the chest. Lilla looked down in shock as the urn shattered and spilled all over her. Her eyes rolled up and her knees buckled.
At this, the Red Specter took his eyes of Shiori, who turned into gas and flew up into the sky, staying just close enough to deliver one last taunt through her disembodied face.
"Poor little Lilla. Pray that your precious hero can offer you any comfort in your last moment. Good luck seeking warmth from a cold corpse. You're so good at slaughtering my gas-men, Red Specter--so I'll leave you with one more to dispose of. And remember this, Red Specter! Remember the price you pay for ever daring to defy me, Shiori Rosewing!" And then she jetted off into the night, carrying little Pochi with her, leaving only mocking laughter behind. "OHH HO HO Ho Ho Ho ho ho ho..."
All the men rushed to Lilla’s side, but the Red Specter got there first, taking her in her arms as she gaped in horror at her own body, as the outlines of her hands started to blur as pink vapor streamed off them.
"No!" cried the Professor. "That's the first stages of the transformation! My adopted grand-daughter... is turning into... A GAS MAN!"
To Be Continued... was what it read at the very bottom of the panel. And that was today’s paper. Joy was all caught up. Aiyah! What a place to stop. What were the writers thinking? Didn't they have any consideration for their readers?
Now she would to spend a whole day on pins and needles wondering what was going to happen to poor Lilla. Well, granted, it wouldn’t be the worst loss to the team, since Lilla hardly did anything, and that had been getting on Joy’s nerves. But that didn’t mean she wanted to see Lilla die or anything. Interesting, that last line, though: adopted granddaughter. So Lilla wasn’t ethnic Xia at all. That was a bit disappointing, but whatever.
And beyond that, she’d wasted a huge amount of time. The whole point of this had been to get a good idea of the Red Specter's character... and she hadn't done that! She'd read two month's worth of strips, and she still barely knew anything about him. He'd only shown up for short action sequences and had very few lines when he did. How was that a Red Specter comic? Misleading title much? She’d need a much better sense of his character if she was supposed to fake-interview him.
Maybe she hadn't read enough. The strip had been going on for a while. Maybe this last story was just a fluke, a change-up of POV. She should check out more strips to be sure. She'd just read the past two months’ worth. She could go back another four months... no—six months. She just needed to exercise more discipline with her reading. She didn’t need to mess around with any more of the hidden-object schtick that the artist was so fond of. She only needed the parts where the title character showed up and had lines. It was as simple as that.
Joy gathered up all the loose newspapers, along with the monthly bound volumes, and returned them to the archive shelves. Only after she’d put them back in place did she stop to wonder why she’d done that. She stared long and hard at the past two-and-a-half’s months’ worth of papers, realizing that all her work for the Gazette was contained right there, and that they were certainly the only archived copies of that work in existence. And if those volumes were to just walk off and disappear, so would any evidence that she’d ever worked for this sleazy tabloid. Forget any stupid ideas about arson—all she had to do was sneak off with a few books. Granted, they were large, bulky books, so sneaking anywhere with them would be tricky, but still, she should still be able to…
Joy shook her head. This wasn’t helpful. And she really didn’t like this train of thought at all. She was a good person—or, at least she always tried to be. The fact that she was thinking about stealing and burning other peoples’ property worried her. What had gone wrong with her life, that she was seriously considering committing a crime, even a really petty one? Something could go wrong. Something she hadn’t thought of.
And anyway, thinking about how to destroy her shameful tabloid reporting now was pointless. She was about to do a whole lot more of it, wasn’t she? Because she had no other choice. Wait until she’d finished her last Gazette article and was ready to jump ship to a real paper. Then she could weigh the pros and cons of stealing Gazette archives. Agonizing over it now was a waste of mental energy. She needed to get back to her
research.
She returned to her reading bench in the hallway with another three archive volumes. The next story was more of the same. Well, the villain was different, a “Doctor Clockwork” who used rogue analytical engines to make a platoon of Steam golems go berserk. But it was still the same formula—Zhang’s team tried and failed to stop the villain, Lilla got captured, and then the Red Specter swooped in at the last minute to save everybody, and Dr. Zhang capped it off with a pat moral about the dangers of technology and the need to use it responsibly.
The Specter barely had any lines. Joy had learned next to nothing about him, though she had learned that Lilla’s last name was Lemko. Dr. Zhang was a family friend who’d taken her in after her parents had been killed in the Great War.
Joy sighed and decided to take a break. She yawned and stretched, feeling a few things pop around her neck and shoulder. It was hard to get the heavy archive volumes into a comfy reading position on the hallway bench. Even skimming, she’d let herself get sucked into the story, and forgotten to move around at all. She paced about the hallway for a minute or two to work the kinks out before hauling the volumes back to their places on the shelves.
She looked back at the previous two months. Should she read another? Her sense of the character was still really thin. Was it enough to write a fake Red Specter interview?
She thought over all his grim lines in their spooky, heavy font, all the hints he’d dropped about the darkness of his life, which normal people were “better off not knowing”, his “stuck between life and death” shtick, and an image of the Red Specter did form in her mind. Unfortunately, it was an image of a mopey teenager holed up in his room, dressed all in black, with the back of his hand permanently stapled to his forehead, writing pages and pages of terrible poetry in his journal, all about how life was nothing but suffering and pain and emptiness and not only did Susie Horvath not know he existed, but she’d even started going out with that turdball Chet Lazlo, and ALL WAS DARKNESS!
Joy had to steady herself against the steel shelves until her giggle fit passed. Okay, she doubted that was characterization Garai was looking for. She had to remember, it needed be just the right kind of nonsense. All right, she’d read one more story arc—see if that turned up anything useful. She pulled down two more months’ worth of archives and hauled them back to her reading bench.
The next, or rather, previous story was a big change-up in narrative style. Not only did this story barely feature the Red Specter, it had few of the other heroes either. It seemed to be going for a gritty noir thriller from the viewpoint of a Triad boss by the name of Yajin Jang, a.k.a. “Diamond Jang, King of the Underworld.” Diamond Jang started selling a new drug called “Dreamtime,” and his business began to suffer one mysterious mishap after another, while the Red Specter’s silhouette appeared in the background. Finally, the Red Specter sent Jang a direct warning: stop making Dreamtime, for the drug “blurred the line between this world and the next,” or else the Specter would take his organization apart, piece by piece.
Of course Jang didn’t listen, and the stakes escalated. As his situation grew more and precarious, Diamond Jang’s mental state deteriorated, until he finally resorted to taking Dreamtime himself.
The next bit of the comic got really bizarre, with Jang ascending up to the Pure Land, before meeting the Red Specter, who chased him down to the Abyss, the cold void outside the cosmic Great Wheel, full of nameless Things that would devour and un-make the souls of the truly despicable.
But then Jang woke up to the sound of the police busting down his door, setting off an extended action scene, culminating in a confrontation with the real Red Specter that ended with Jang being carted off to a mental hospital, his mind broken, as the heroes reflected on the Moral of the Story, and the Red Specter… here we go… the Red Specter uttered a few pithy lines, repeated his catchphrase, and flew off.
Joy sighed. Once again, the Red Specter barely appeared in his own comic strip, and half the time he wasn't even himself--just a hallucination in a drugged-out mobster's mind. Though, Joy had to admit, her earlier impression of the Red Specter as a mopey, over-dramatic teenager didn’t seem as apt as it had before.
Some of the imagery in this story had been legitimately creepy—especially the bits with the Abyss. Joy knew most of the teachers at her temple didn’t take ideas like monsters in the Abyss or even the Pure Land very seriously. They chose to put their emphasis on Lir Kovidh’s teachings of awareness, kindness, and morality, over those more fantastic elements. Still, she could never be totally sure those tales weren’t true—that there might be some horrible punishment lying in wait for the spirits of wicked people, to snatch them up before they could reincarnate.
Joy shivered just a tiny bit, inadvertently tugging at one of the pages, pulling it partially free of its binding—about three inches worth of page separated from the spine. Joy cursed under her breath and pushed it back into place. She closed and opened the book. It looked like the rest of the pages held the torn page in place pretty well. It wasn’t all that noticeable. And really, who would notice anyway? Even at legitimate newspapers, most archives went unread. And these were tabloid archives. She could tear out every third page and probably no one would even notice…
Joy sat bolt upright as the full implications of her musings hit her. She could really do that. She really could. Forget stealing a volume—all she had to do was flip through the archives, neatly tear out every single one of her stories, stuff them in her purse, take them home and burn them, and no one would ever be the wiser. She’d be leaving the overwhelming majority of Garai’s property untouched. She wouldn’t be destroying anybody else’s work—just her own. Joy turned the idea over in her head, looking for a downside, and not finding much of one. The odds she’d get caught doing it seemed incredibly low, as long as she was smart about it. The odds that anyone would discover it after the fact were even lower.
Realistically, they were practically nil. So why did the very idea make her nervous. Especially with all this business of wicked souls getting cast to the Abyss. No—that was silly, no one would be sent to the Abyss over a little newspaper vandalism. Or would they?
She shook her head to clear it, stood up, and stretched. This was all pointless right now. She couldn’t do anything until after she’d finished her last Gazette article, anyway. No, check that—she’d need to wait until the month after her last article. Because if there was one time they might notice missing pages, it would be when they were cutting and trimming the loose papers for binding. Time to focus on the now.
And right now, she’d read enough comics. Sadly, Joy still didn’t feel like much of a Red Specter expert. The character remained nearly as confusing as he had before. She didn’t have any confidence that she could write a bunch of fake interview responses for him. But it was getting late.
Joy looked over the witness list and sighed. Might as well see who she could track down. Maybe one of these witnesses might have something interesting or coherent to say. Maybe they’d give her a jolt of inspiration for her fake interview. Or, if not, then the Gazette archives with their Red Specter comics would still be here tomorrow. But considering how unreliable some of Garai’s contacts could be, if she waited a day there, her witnesses could disappear to some other city or country overnight. Time to hit the streets.
Part IV
Legwork
Chapter 17
A Holiday For Everyone Else
Joy emerged from the dark foyer of the Gazette offices and stepped out into the street. The sun was painfully bright. Even though she wore her sun hat, still she had to stop and squint until her eyes adjusted. Everything seemed extra-vibrant and extra-loud today. Everyone was gearing up for Liberation Day tomorrow. The red and gold national flag of Kallistrate hung everywhere, along with assorted draperies and trim. The street vendors seemed to be in a competition as to who could be the most obviously patriotic, and even the ones who weren’t going all-out would have at least a small flag mount
ed somewhere on their kiosk. Because it wouldn’t do to not have anything. Folks might think you weren’t patriotic, and you could lose business. That reality bothered Joy, but the delicious smell of roasting meat from one of the street vendors drove that thought right out of her mind. Her stomach complained at her, so loudly that she was surprised when no heads turned to check out the commotion. Her donut breakfast was not sustaining her all that well. She wanted something hot and savory, and for a minute she mulled over the option of getting a simple meat-bun to tide her over—just one!
But no, she knew exactly how much money she didn’t have in her wallet, and would continue to not have until she finished her ridiculous assignment. She was just going to have to tough it out until she made it back to her apartment for dinnertime. She had food there—stockpiled from a military surplus sale. She'd bought an entire pantry’s-worth of canned goods: beans, preserved fruit, canned corn, canned tomatoes, packed tins of shredded fish and crab meat, and, uh…’Victory Meat.’
Victory Meat was another of Kallistrate’s wartime industrial triumphs, specially engineered to alleviate food shortages. Victory Meat was… well, it was a square-ish tin containing a block of pink meat that was… ham, basically? It kinda tasted like ham. Ham-ish? Ham-adjacent? She was sure there were pig parts in there somewhere. Well, the point was that a sealed tin of Victory Meat would keep forever, and she’d been able to get stacks of it for cheap. And she had three huge burlap sacks on her makeshift pantry floor, surrounded by a minefield of mousetraps. One sack of dried noodles, one sack of uncooked rice, and one sack of potatoes. She’d been giving the potatoes priority lately, since some of them were starting to sprout. But anyway, all she needed to do was pick a staple, cook that, pick one or two of her tinned meats or veggies, heat those up, combine and add with a little salt and pepper, and you had a hot, filling meal.
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