“The World’s Greatest Detective®,” growled the black-haired septuagenarian. “Period.”
Brotherfly: “Damn, Squirrelly. Takes balls to be trademarkin y’self as the world’s greatest dick, knawm sayn? Bzzzt!” Everyone ignored André while he laughed. “C’mon, y’all! All y’all can’t be that uptight, can ya? Who gon leave a brother hangin like that? Syndi-girl, snap me a bzzzt! from them bad girls!”
Syndi smirked and shook her fortified cleavage in tardy acknowledgment of his jape.
“That’s what I’m talkin ’bout! Bzzzt!”
“Kot-tam, André,” snapped Kareem, “would you please, for just five minutes, QC?”
“Whuzzat, Exxy?”
“Quit cooning!”
“Festus,” I refocused, “you’ve never been one to follow orders meekly. So why haven’t you defied the F*L*A*C and marched out the door?”
Festus Piltdown III sat back in his chair and crossed his gloved forearms over the flying squirrel silhouette emblazoned on the tunic covering his massive chest.
X-Man: “I can tell you why, Doc.”
“Kareem, ze doktor dit not ask you.”
“And the Squirrel didn’t answer her, Hnossi!”
“Gawd, Kareem, would you, like, shut up?” said Syndi, stamping her boots, one-two, and putting one hand on her hip-strung backlash. “You want her blowing her, like, whistle-thingy again?”
Finally Omnipotent Man put up his hand.
“See now, ma’am-doctor, maybe Festy’s a might modest, but as y’all probably know, he’s fixin’ to run in th’upcoming election for Director of Operations. You knew that, din’tcha?”
“I think I recall having heard it somewhere, Wally, but as I don’t follow politics, it must’ve slipped my mind.”
“Wellsir, an as y’can pro’ly guess, if the F*L*A*C shows ol Festy out through the F*O*O*J saloon flappers, he caint run for D.O.O. Then his dreams’re hooched, knowuttamean?”
“I, uh…I think so, Wally.”
“An Festy pro’ly figures, an I agree with im, that he’s earned this goldang job. He was in the F*O*O*J almost since the beginnin, he’s served almost evra other p’sition on the F*L*A*C—Director of Personnel, of Finance, of Investigation—he was even Chair once. So y’can unnerstan if the F*L*A*C sendin im to your woodshed an threat’nin to turn im loose altogether has got his fur up an hackled.”
I asked Festus how he felt about Wally’s remarks.
He glared back at me with all the glowering, terrifying, predatory intimidation of his mammalian namesake.
On the Receiving End of F*L*A*C
For a group of men and women who had devoted their lives to saving others, my six psychemotional journeyers were stunningly incapable of saving themselves. That many of them despised one another was obvious to anyone; that each one despised him-or herself was unknown to all of them.
And that is why the F*O*O*J’s F*L*A*C had ordered them into my care and analysis, since the infighting and dysfunctionality generated by their mutual-and self-loathing threatened to vaporize their organization at a time when the F*O*O*J was particularly vulnerable: election time. Three of the six directorships were up for grabs, and for the first time since the F*O*O*J’s inception, so was the post of Director of Operations.
In theory the most powerful position on the F*O*O*J Leadership Administrative Council, the DOO was responsible for setting long-range mission goals, determining strategy and vetting tactics, outlining long-term needs for staff and matériel acquisition, and, potentially, reforming the obese F*O*O*J bureaucracy. The retirement of Colonel Strom Flintlock from his grandfathered, unelected position meant that the F*O*O*J was poised for potentially massive change. And while many people had assumed that Festus Piltdown III, HKA the Flying Squirrel, was destined for the DOO post which was the de facto commander-in-chieftancy of the F*O*O*J, there was a surprise buried beneath the election field like a land mine in a miniature golf course.
If the F*O*O*J had been a vehicle for national and even global change, the F*L*A*C was the front axis of that vehicle’s wheels. So the candidate—or candidates—in our therapeutic sessions were in desperate need of a good greasing.
Back Issues: The Origins of the F*O*O*J
Forged during America’s now mythical Golden Age of Heroism to counter the threats of rum-running, communism, juvenile delinquency, and marijuana, the (then) Fraternal Order of Justice was Earth’s foremost and finest fighting force of fury. Delivering the decisive blow against the German war machine following the Soviet invasion of Berlin, the F*O*O*J became a planetary icon for justice and freedom. Its founding members’ names are synonymous with glory: Omnipotent Man, Iron Lass, Lady Liberty, Gil Gamoid and the N-Kid, Captain Manifest Destiny, and their brilliant, mysterious, mystical mentor, the incredible Hawk King.
Returning to America and the expansive East Coast metropolis of Seagull City, the F*O*O*J moved into its first legendary headquarters, the Mando Mansion, and began recruiting among the nation’s growing ranks of costumed avengers.
Thus began the F*O*O*J’s Silver Age, whose new stars would shine as brightly as the originals—Siren, the Evolutionist, Flying Squirrel, and Chip Monk—defending our country and our planet against some of the worst scourges imaginable: Nemesaur, the Leninoids, Codzilla, Black Mamba, Standing Buffalo, Cosmicus and the Hordes of Entropy…truly an unlimited series.
But in the goggled eyes of some, the atomic-powered America of the Silver Age was mutating into something unrecognizable. Gone were the neat pleats and fedoras of the founding era of the F*O*O*J. Now rock and roll, the Civil Rights and women’s movements, miniskirts, hippies, and drugs were bubbling out of the gutters and recoloring the splash pages of our country.
Like most institutions, the conservative F*O*O*J resisted any change until change was forced upon it, mandated not only by the pervasive influence of altered American mores, but by legal action. Gone was the adjective fraternal because of the Siren’s embittering lawsuit; the word was replaced by fantastic, so the F*O*O*J’s heralding acronym could be preserved.
Other changes—some with far more sweeping outcomes—were on the way. Warlock War II saw the magical relocation of Seagull City to the West Coast and its integration into the city of Los Ditkos. The war’s destruction of Mando Mansion led Festus Piltdown III to construct a replacement F*O*O*J headquarters, the glittering gold-silver Fortress of Freedom, which remains the leading tourist attraction of downtown Bird Island in Los Ditkos. Perhaps most contentiously, as a recipient of federal security contracts under President Nixon, the organization could not by the early 1970s continue to receive such funding if it remained all-white. Racial integration of the F*O*O*J introduced America to such now-classic crimefighters as the Spook and La Cucaracha.
Colossal figures were undergoing colossal change.
The Bitter Aftertaste in the Chalice of Victory
But there’s only so much change any organization can take before its primary-colored tunic begins washing out and splitting at the seams.
Integration, popular demands that the F*O*O*J apply itself to new threats such as environmental devastation and domestic abuse, and increasing public concern about due process and the legal loopholeism that allowed superheroes to operate meant that the legitimacy of the F*O*O*J’s mission—if not its very existence—was in question.
But no one, least of all the F*O*O*J’s founders, could have dreamed of the devastating impact that America’s and the world’s two major victories would have: the almost simultaneous collapse of communism and victory in the Götterdämmerung, the global war against supervillains.
Suddenly, for more than two hundred active F*O*O*Jsters, several hundred affiliates, and the public they were sworn to protect (and whose taxes funded them), the F*O*O*J no longer had any reason to exist.
Fortunately for the F*O*O*J, drugs continued to plague America’s cities, but the battle against this epidemic lacked sufficient drama to inspire a generation and the media, and it initiated as many
awkward questions as it answered.
Inheriting a lugubriously legendary legacy impossible to leap above, but no longer possessing a substantial-enough organizing objective (or “mythic narrative”), the F*O*O*J’s workplace dysfunction soon became a matter of public record. Bickering among heroes transformed itself into publicized personal attacks and escalated into lawsuits, public brawling that shattered whole city blocks, and finally criminal charges against legendary heroes in front of a mortified America.
RELEASED: Jack Zenith’s sensational Two Masks of a “Hero,” the era-shattering tell-all and the very first investigative book on the F*O*O*J with a credible inside source—Clifford David Stinson, HKA the Blue Smasher.
REVEALED: Decades-old internal conflicts; lurid allegations of harassment, assault, and perversion; cases of heroes gambling on the outcomes of their own superbattles; countless tales of substance abuse, power-fixation and dimension-shifting; and most shocking of all, the outing of dozens of secret identities.
REDUCED: Dozens of heroes who had traipsed across our globe like gods above the Trojan War were revealed as the lawyers, scientists, industrial magnates, romance novelists, major imprint editors, husbands, wives, and robots they actually were.
For a world weary and wary of secrecy among the powerful, Two Masks of a “Hero” was an electromagnet for the alloy of public scrutiny and popular outrage. Demands exploded for the full disclosure of F*O*O*J mission records and especially its financial accounts. On the advice of managers, attorneys, and PR agents, some heroes preemptively revealed their own identities in order to shape perception about themselves and their careers and thereby limit the damage from ongoing and future investigations.
The shattering of the old paradigm was loud enough to cause permanent damage to the ears of some heroes, and just as the ear is the center of balance, the psychological disequilibrium that followed cast many costumed crusaders upon the grimy, vomit-streaked barroom floors of their careers and personal lives. Golden Age icons and F*O*O*J founders such as Gil Gamoid and his sidekick the N-Kid, implicated in a heinous conspiracy and revealed at trial to be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, were sent to languish in the psychic detention facilities of Asteroid Zed. And although rumors of sightings persisted, since 1975 the immeasurably masterful Hawk King had withdrawn to his mysterious Blue Pyramid, accepting only a rare audience for his cosmic counsel.
If Golden Age greats such as Gil Gamoid and the N-Kid could disintegrate, and if visionary founders such as Hawk King could abandon the world of men, then surely the epoch of the invincibles was as done as that of the dinosaurs.
The resulting shock wave through the hero community saw not only the inferno of more published tell-alls, but a tornado of resignations, divorces, self-exiles, and even suicides. And so the new generation of 1980s and ’90s crimefighters, the so-called Digital Age warriors, was all dressed up…but with no place to go.
America not only didn’t need heroes anymore—it no longer believed they existed.
Hyper-potentiality Is First and Last a State of Mind
Such a private and public crisis of confidence was the situation as the F*O*O*J stared into the new millennium.
Lacking a substantial external threat around which to create a new mission but teeming with internal contradictions that threatened its cohesion, the Fantastic Order of Justice found itself in a crisis that could only be resolved by looking within, especially for two generations of its most conflicted members.
Adding to this instability was the imminent power vacuum of an oncoming election. And except for the fanatical conspirators involved, no one could have guessed how that election would lead directly to the July 16 Attacks.
Facing this complex interconnection of social, political, and psychemotional chaos, none of which could be resolved by teleportation, spirit-gems, kraton beams, or an old-fashioned “dustup,” I charged my six sanity-supplicants with a new mission. That mission was for them to come to terms with the very ordinary, very fragile defining human experience: fundamental emptiness and limitless fear of meaninglessness, or what I call the “Crisis of Infinite Dearths.” If your own identity is mission-rooted, and your mission is now complete, how could you not be confused as to who you really are?
Directed to me by the winding country lanes of their own confusion, my patients arrived at my Hyper-Potentiality Clinic yoked to wagonloads of psychemotionally dysfunctional produce. Other than this group’s toxic mutual antagonism, chief among the disruptive behaviors reported to me by the F*L*A*C were:
• the questionable competence and unrealistically unflappable optimism of Omnipotent Man
• the bullying, aggression, and rage of the Flying Squirrel
• the micromanagement devolving into nanomanagement by Iron Lass
• the social inappropriateness bordering on sexual harassment of the Brotherfly
• the narcissism and self-absorption of Power Grrrl
• the insubordination and racial antagonism of, and unapproved investigations by, the X-Man
Even during those first sessions, I had recognized an encyclopedia of psychosocial crises besetting the group—unmanaged anger and guilt, sexual confusion, the Uranus Complex, Secret Identity Diffusion, and the Savior Complex chief among them.
Clearly, ahead of us lay a Trojan struggle to resolve the problems of such great powers. But of course, with great power there must also come great psychoanalysis.
And just as it was my task to help the F*O*O*Jsters accurately envisage their own contraefficiencies, so is it your mission to recognize your own. Periodically throughout this book I’ll be asking you to write down your answers to the generation-appropriate questions I posed to my “Big Six” throughout our explosive time together. Write your brief (ten words or fewer) responses in a journal, and then reflect on how they change depending on the varying exercises and processing you’re experiencing each time.
For Golden and Silver Age heroes: What will it mean for your life, and your view of yourself, if the glory days never return?
Omnipotent Man: “I’m good. America’s good. And being good is great.”
Flying Squirrel: “Given these pathetic invalids, America needs me more than ever.”
Iron Lass: “Never was it glory, but ever justice that I sought.”
For Digital Age heroes: How will you face knowing that you will never exceed, or even equal, the accomplishments of your predecessors?
Brotherfly: “Brotherfly be fine. Always has been. He’s a survivor.”
Power Grrrl: “They never looked inside themselves. I won’t make that mistake.”
X-Man: “Who are they to be equal to? Deserve victory. Period.”
Gazing into the Dusk
Mere demi-moments into our reconvened session in the Verbalarium, I was summoned by my secretary to take a call. Knowing that only a true emergency could have motivated Ms. Olsen to have disturbed the sanctity of a session, I took a call from the Spectacle, the F*O*O*J Director of Investigations.
I listened to the Spectacle, and the world as I knew it shattered.
And while none could have then known, the information conveyed in that call led directly to the abomination of the July 16 Attacks.
Exerting every erg of professionalism at my command, I reentered the discussion chamber with a visage of calm detachment.
As I continued around the circle, the Brotherfly glanced up at me anxiously. For the first time since I’d met him, his face and posture betrayed an emotion other than flip playfulness or hyperscrotal lust. Perhaps his legendary “fly-feel” was tingling, hinting to him the horror of what I was about to reveal.
“My friends,” I said finally, clearing my throat, “I have…some very difficult news…to share with you.”
“What, Doc?” asked the Brotherfly.
“The man…the hero…you knew as the incredible Hawk King…is dead.”
Everyone stood, their faces focused on mine.
Jaws unlatched, relatched.
&nbs
p; “Vut?” said Iron Lass at last. “You caan’t be—Frau Doktor, zat’s impossible—Hawk Kink caan’t—”
“Now ma’am-doctor, you musta gotten yer facts wrong on that one, cuz ev’rabody knows that ol Hawk King can’t—”
“Miss Brain, I do believe you’ve flipped your substandard lid. Master Hawk King is an Egyptian deity—dying, by definition, is one of the few deeds beyond his potential—”
“How?” yelled X-Man, standing, the sole voice of non-denial. “How? Kot-tammit, how?”
“The call came directly from the F*O*O*J,” I explained. “Major Ursa had an audience scheduled at the Hour of the Ninth Gate last night…but the Ka-Sentinels at the Blue Pyramid never showed up to let her inside the retaining wall—”
“Ze Kingk never missed an appointment,” said Iron Lass. “Not in over fifty yearss, for any reason—”
“When there was still no response by ten A.M. today, Major Ursa and the Spectacle led a team back to Sunhawk Island. The gate was open, the Ka-Sentinels were in a state of stupefaction…The Pyramid portal was open…
“They found Hawk King lying on his back inside his Duat Chamber, gripping his crook and flail.”
They stood silently, but their eyes were screaming.
“The Spectacle’s preliminary call,” I concluded, “is natural causes.”
“ ‘Natural causes’?” spat the X-Man. “Closest thing to invincible, closest thing to omniscient, and suddenly, just like that, dead by ‘natural causes’?”
While the rest of us stood impotently, Kareem lowered himself back into his chair, his face ripped by rage, and then suddenly, horribly blank. And incongruously in that expressionless void, tears seeped from his eyes.
Minister Faust Page 3
