Omega Superhero Box Set

by Darius Brasher

  Behind the mansion was a hidden, underground aircraft hangar. Between the fence around the mansion and the mansion itself was Sentinels Park. Open to the public, the park was a large, immaculately maintained green space. Statues of all the Sentinels, past and present, were positioned throughout the park. Almost all of them were made of marble. The only one that was not was made of bronze and positioned near the front of the mansion. It depicted the six current Sentinels. At the base of the statue were the words of the team’s motto: “Those who sow darkness soon shall reap.” The motto was an excerpt from the Hero’s Oath, but the general public did not know that. The fact there even was a Hero’s Oath was a secret, like a secret handshake between lodge members.

  Even from up here, I could see the part of the bronze statue that represented Mechano. His bronze body gleamed in the spotlight shining on the statue. If I were a bird, I would have pooped on it. But I wasn’t, so I didn’t. I did not want to risk being the Hero caught, with his costume’s pants around his ankles, defecating on a statue in Sentinels Park. What a shitty way to become famous.

  A massive marble statue of Omega Man loomed up from the middle of the park, dwarfing the rest of the statues. Like the mansion, spotlights lit the gleaming white statue. It was shorter than the four-story mansion, but not by a lot. Omega Man’s Metahuman power had been the ability to control gravitons, the particles that comprised gravity. He had been so powerful that people thought he could have split the Earth into two had he been so inclined. Fortunately, he never would have done such a thing. His powers were equaled only by his wisdom in using them.

  Omega Man’s head was positioned so that he looked off into the horizon. As coincidence would have it, I had flown in at an angle so that Omega Man seemed to now be staring directly at me. Watching to see if I screwed up my visit to the Sentinels, no doubt. There was a big omega symbol on the ornate clasp that held his cape together around his neck. Even wrought in marble, Omega Man’s cape seemed to billow out behind him heroically. His hair had been so artfully carved that it almost seemed to blow in the breeze. His muscular torso was V-shaped, tapering down to a waist against which his clenched fists were pressed in determination. He had high cheek bones, a dimple in his chin, and a square jaw. If he was not male model handsome, it was a near thing. Even in marble form, Omega Man looked like he was about to spring into action to succor the afflicted and strike a mighty blow against the wicked. I wouldn’t be surprised to find a picture of Omega Man if I opened a dictionary and looked up the word “hero.” I knew I wouldn’t find a picture of me there. I’d already looked.

  And I was supposed to be the reincarnation of this guy? Hah! Whoever oversaw reincarnations had neglected to give me Omega Man’s good looks and impressive muscles. I wanted to return the product as being defective, but I feared I was twenty years too late for that. Though I was too far away to see it, I knew from prior visits to the mansion that a bronze plaque was next to Omega Man that summarized his accomplishments. I couldn’t imagine him becoming me was listed as one of them.

  I let out the long breath I had been holding. I was procrastinating, and I knew it. WWOMD? Not hover up here in the air like a confused dragonfly, staring at statuary, thinking about taking a dump on one of them, and letting his imagination run wild with all the terrible things that could possibly happen, that’s for sure. And yeah, I definitely needed to come up with a better acronym.

  I tried to shake off my fears and foreboding. I descended, landing in the park in front of the mansion. The statue of Omega Man was now at my back. The grass had recently been watered. My boots sank down into the wet ground a tad. A landmine did not explode under me, I was not ensnared in an electrified net, and a bear trap didn’t clamp down around my ankle. Something like that would almost be welcome at this point. A threat I could deal with. The complete absence of anything or anyone when I had been all keyed up to deal with the opposite was really freaking me out.

  I looked up at the big mansion. A chill ran down my spine. It was part apprehension, part awe at where I stood. Made of white sandstone and featuring soaring columns, turrets, spires, and battlements, Sentinels Mansion looked like the bastard child of an ancient Greek temple and a medieval English castle. Most of the Sentinels lived here, so the sprawling edifice also functioned as a residence.

  A large portico extended from the front of the mansion. The stairs to the portico were in front of me. Normally there would be guards posted next to the columns that supported the roof of the portico. They were nowhere to be seen. Not that I needed it, but the guards’ absence was further proof something was amiss. The Sentinels had made a lot of enemies over the years. As far as I knew, the mansion was never left unguarded with the defenses turned off.

  Though no one was visible, I could not shake the feeling that I was being watched. I felt like a nervous antelope walking in the Serengeti with lions lying in wait in the tall grass. I did not have Spider-Man’s Spidey-sense, but that didn’t stop me from feeling like I was in danger.

  I lifted my hands a little and let out a pulse of my telekinetic touch, like the one I had used to locate Cassandra in Areola 51. The pulse confirmed that there was no one around outside with me, which made me feel better. My pulse could not penetrate the walls of the mansion though, which made me feel worse. I had no way of knowing if any of the Sentinels were home, much less Mechano. There could be a horde of demon-possessed Rogues waiting for me inside, and I would be none the wiser. I had never encountered something my telekinetic touch could not penetrate. Running across that something the night I decided to confront Mechano did not make me jump for joy.

  I climbed up the stairs to the portico. Once on it, I face a stained, dark wooden door that was closed. A doorbell was next to it. This was the main entrance. The entrance people used to tour the part of the mansion that was open to the public was on the east side of the building. I knew from my Sentinels research that normally the only way a non-Sentinel was allowed through this main entrance was if he was expected, if he had already passed a security clearance, and if a retinal and handprint scan confirmed his identity.

  I had come too far to be thwarted by a closed door. I was thinking about how much trouble I would get into by forcing my way in when something strange happened:

  The front door swung open silently. Silent darkness lay within.

  Yeah, this wasn’t at all creepy.

  “It’s a trap!” exclaimed Admiral Ackbar’s voice in my head from Return of the Jedi. If this were a movie, this would be the part where the audience would be yelling at the screen, warning me to not go inside. In the movies, a guy walking into a dark, seemingly abandoned house in the middle of the night after its door magically opened to him never ended well. I kinda wished Isaac were with me. In the movies, when creepy stuff went down, the black guy always got the shaft first. It would give my cowardly white ass a chance to get away.

  Though I knew it was just my nerves talking, I still felt shame at my throw Isaac under the bus thought. Besides, this wasn’t a movie, Star Wars or otherwise. I’ve always been more of a Star Trek fan, anyway. What was there to be afraid off? I was a Hero. History had shown I could handle myself. I wasn’t scared.

  My insides quivered. My instincts shrieked at me to turn around and fly far, far away.

  Okay, maybe I was a little scared.

  What would Omega Man do? Not fear his own shadow, that’s for sure.

  I screwed my courage to the sticking place, as the Bard would say. I stood up straight and squared my shoulders. I took a deep breath and puffed my chest out. What was there to be worried about? I was an Omega-level Metahuman, and the reincarnation of Omega Man to boot. I was the very model of a modern licensed Hero. First Shakespeare, now Gilbert and Sullivan. Apparently, my brain took solace in the classics when I was nervous.

  I was procrastinating.

  Trying to channel my inner Omega Man, I strode through the open door. It closed behind me with an ominous click. I was engulfed in darkness as if I had been
swallowed by a whale.

  17

  It was quiet inside of Sentinels Mansion. It smelled the way some old people’s houses did, of antique furniture, moldering books, and being closed for too long. It took my eyes a few moments to adjust from the spotlight-illuminated brightness of the outside. Once they did, I realized my surroundings were not as dark as I had first supposed. There was an orb about four feet in front of me, hovering slightly off the ground like a balloon which had lost most of its helium. The orb was a tad smaller than my fist. It glowed very faintly, like a firefly’s bioluminescence. It dimly illuminated the foyer I was in.

  I was immediately suspicious of it. A glowing ball had exploded in my face after that foiled bank robbery in D.C. Another had exploded during my third Trials’ test and would have killed me had I not absorbed and redirected the energy from the explosion. Fool me once with an exploding ball, shame on you; fool me three times with an exploding ball, shame on me.

  With my personal shield up to protect me if the past was prologue, I poked tentatively at the glowing orb with my telekinetic touch. Fortunately, whatever had prevented me from scanning the interior of the mansion from outside of it did not seem to have an impact on my powers here. I halfway expected the orb to explode as soon as my telekinetic touch contacted it. Instead, nothing happened. Though my telekinesis was operating as normal, my telekinetic touch passed right through the orb like there was nothing there. There was no resistance to my touch, no pushback, no movement of the orb, no anything. It was as if I probed thin air. Thin air did not glow like this, though. I had never seen anything like it.

  Encouraged that my powers were behaving normally again, I tried to use them to probe beyond this room and further into the mansion. I could not reach beyond this room, though. Maybe there was something built into the walls of the mansion that blocked my powers.

  Still wary of the glowing orb despite its seeming insubstantiality, I used its light to look around. The parquet floor of the foyer I was in gleamed with polish even in the dim lighting. Straight ahead, on the other side of the glowing ball, was an open doorway. There was an old-fashioned wooden hat rack in the corner by the door I had just passed through. It was the only piece of furniture in the room.

  Some instinct made me try the door which had closed behind me. Though the knob twisted in my hand, I could not open it. I braced myself and really put my back into it. The door did not budge so much as a millimeter. I stopped straining at it before I pulled a muscle. Maybe Avatar and his super strength could have forced the door open again, but I could not seem to. I tried to latch onto the door with my powers and open it. I was as unable to grab onto it with my powers as I had been unable to probe beyond the walls of this room with my telekinetic touch.

  Clearly, someone had wanted me to come inside, but they were not eager to have me leave. Though I did not plan on leaving before finding out if Mechano was here, I did not like the fact I could not simply walk back out if I wanted to.

  Feeling a little like a mouse in a trap, I turned away from the sealed door. Several framed pictures hung in two vertical columns on either side of the open doorway ahead of me. I stepped forward to get a better look at them. The glowing orb moved as well, staying the same distance from me it had started off at. I froze as soon as the orb moved. I thought my skittishness was understandable. Again, my experience with strange glowing objects had not been particularly positive.

  The orb did not move again until I again stepped toward the open doorway. It stopped again when I stopped. Hmmm, interesting. I did a little experimenting. I stepped to the side. The light did not move. I stepped backward, toward the closed front door. No movement. When I stepped toward the open doorway again, the light started moving as soon as I was about four feet away from it.

  “What, am I supposed to follow you?” My voice sounded like a shout in the quiet of the mansion. There was no answer. Not that I expected one. I was, after all, talking to a glowing ball. What did it say about how weird tonight was that trying to converse with a glowing ball was not the strangest part of it?

  If I tried to search this massive place on my own without the benefit of my powers, it would take forever. If somebody had sent this ball to guide me somewhere, maybe I should let it in the interest of saving time. I would keep my shield up and my wits about me, though. The lack of guards, the property’s defenses being down, the door opening to admit me but refusing to let me out, the haunted house feel of the mansion, an orb that was invisible to my powers leading me down a potential rabbit hole . . . everything about tonight gave me the heebie-jeebies.

  “Lead on, MacDuff,” I said to the ball. It glided away from me as I walked toward it and the open doorway. I hoped the ball appreciated my Shakespearean erudition. If it did, it gave no sign.

  I paused before passing through the doorway to check out the pictures mounted on either side of it. They were group shots of each Sentinels’ team from the group’s founding in the 1940s until now. Each one contained Millennium, the only current Sentinel who had also been one of the team’s founders. Each picture except the last contained seven Heroes. Since Omega Man, Lady Justice, Avatar, Millennium, and three other Heroes had founded the team, thereafter it was Sentinels tradition that seven Heroes were on the team. From time to time there would be vacancies due to death, retirement and, in one infamous incident years ago Truman had been involved in, arrest and imprisonment, but the team always brought its members back up to seven as soon as it could find an appropriate Hero to fill a vacancy.

  Except, that is, in the case of Avatar. His empty spot on the team had not been filled after his murder. That was why the last picture of the Sentinels contained six Heroes rather than the traditional seven. Seer, who had taken over as chairman of the team after Avatar died, once said at a press conference that Avatar’s spot would remain vacant until the team found a Hero worthy of taking his place. Good luck with that, I thought as I looked at the six-member picture, the only one Avatar was not in. Avatar had been an Omega-level Hero with the strength of a god and the morals of a monk. Replacing him was not a simple matter of picking a new one out at Heroes R Us.

  In these pictures of the Sentinels, there were no cheesy grins like there often were in group portraits. Each Hero captured in these pictures looked as serious as a heart attack. I guess world-saving was grim work.

  The glowing orb waited patiently for me in the next room. It started moving again once I stepped through the doorway toward it. I kept walking, following the ball’s glowing guidance. Anytime I did not go where the ball apparently wanted me to go, it froze in place until I started walking in the right direction again.

  With the ball as my guide and only source of illumination, I made my way deeper into the dark mansion, twisting and turning through a multitude of rooms. Though I could see but faintly, the rooms I passed through seemed like they belonged in a castle a couple of centuries ago, not in the headquarters of a modern Hero team. They were full of heavy furniture, tapestries, old-fashioned weapons, relics, and antiques, each one labelled. Before long, I had lost all sense of direction. It was like wandering through a building that was part maze, part museum, and part haunted house full of shadowy objects. I doubted I could make my way back to the front entrance without help. It was a shame I had not thought to unwind a ball of string behind me à la Theseus. I hoped the glowing orb was not taking me to see the Minotaur. Isaac had turned into the Minotaur during our battle in the Trials. It had been terrifying. I had no interest in tangling with the creature again.

  Though I did not see the Minotaur, I saw things equally fantastic as the ball led me through the bowels of the mansion. I hardly believed some of them were real. In one huge room we passed through, I made out the dim outlines of a twin-engine, metal monoplane suspended overhead. A metal plaque on a pedestal under it read Lockheed Model 10 Electra, “The Flying Laboratory,” piloted by Amelia Earhart when she disappeared in 1937. I had always heard that neither Earhart nor her plane had ever been recovered.
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br />   In another room, above a thick mantelpiece, hung a painting I recognized. It was Vincent Van Gogh’s masterpiece The Starry Night. The painting was supposed to be in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. I had seen it there when Isaac, Neha and I had taken a trip to New York back when we were the Old Man’s Apprentices. Maybe the painting and Earhart’s plane were mere replicas. I had a feeling they were not.

  Though many of the things I saw made my eyes wide with wonder, two things in particular made my heart skip a beat. They were both in a large room full of animal trophies. Some of the trophies were stuffed, others were merely skeletons. The room was like a miniature museum of natural history. There was nothing as common as elephants and pigs in here, though. At the far end of the room was a Triceratops, which somehow managed to looked fearsome even in its skeletal form. Around the perimeter of the room was a snake’s skeleton. Well, it would be a snake’s skeleton if a snake was the size of a row of subway cars.

  There were even live animals. In a large cage were perhaps a dozen birds, though it was hard to count them since they flapped around so much. Each over a foot long, the birds flew wildly around inside their cage. It was hard to make out their exact coloration between the dim light and their rapid movements. They made loud, harsh sounds that set my teeth on edge. If they were supposed to be songbirds, they were tone-deaf.