“What’s a matter, Festus?” called Kareem. “Night-vision goggles don’t work? Even infrared is light, you know!”
“So we’re all blind, then! I’ll find you, Edgerton. And when I do, I’ll snap you into kindling!”
“I don’t think so, Festus. You’re tired. Exhausted! I can hear it in your voice! And there’re two of us!”
Sounds of tripping and falling—perhaps one man, maybe more.
The Squirrel: “Ah…but you’re injured and exhausted. As soon as I take out your hooded hoodlum friend and his darkness dissipates, you’ll be nothing but a lame black cockroach that can’t even dash for the shadows. And injured as you are, I’m guessing you won’t have power enough for many word-monstrosities now, will you?”
There were more sounds of crashing.
Kareem: “…Hey, that’s a great gamble, Piltdown. Sure…I don’t have any Words left at all. I’m defenseless!”
The Squirrel: “You’re bluffing.”
Kareem: “Try me.”
Silence.
Kareem: “I’ll give you this, Festus—you had me fooled for the longest time. Didn’t even cross my mind that you were the one who’d arranged Hawk King’s murder.”
Festus: “You Liberian lunatic, so now you’ve shifted your roving delusions from Miss Brain-as-murderess onto me? What’s next? Accusing Iron Lass of assassinating Lincoln? Or Caesar? Or Abel?”
“It took me a while to put it all together, Festy…but when I saw how totally broken up you were about Iron Lass—you haven’t just been mourning her, you’ve been racked with guilt because you never thought your plot would get her poisoned!”
“That’s why you went on this terrorist crusade of yours, you crackpot? Because I was mourning the impending death of a lifelong comrade?”
“No—because you, the world’s self-proclaimed greatest detective, were dragging your feet on two investigations! I thought, Why isn’t he out rousting everyone he can think of? He loves this woman, and revenge is that bastard’s middle name! So why wouldn’t you be attacking somebody, anybody, tossing whole neighborhoods for suspects…unless you knew there was nobody to hunt down, because you’d arranged for Asteroid Zed to be destroyed! Nobody wanted to go up there when Brain insisted, but you practically exploded a lung in protest! And then you wanted to take your own shuttle, but even when you finally relented and took the Space Elevator with us, you still had one of your ships standing by on remote!”
“You equate preparedness with homicide? Your lapses in logic have always been astonishing, Edgerton, but even for you, this is grand!”
More stumbling and crashing.
Kareem: “If I’ve got lapses in my logic, Pilty, it’s funny how much your own computer records and surveillance footage helped form a picture of what you did, and what you’re planning to do.”
Silence.
“Nothing to say to that, huh? Yeah, I thought so. Even I didn’t know I could do that until escaping Asteroid Zed gave me no choice but to send my Words inside the computers. But because of that crash course I realized I could search your mainframe, and that’s how I found out the people you’ve had combing the Middle East had finally located the Scepter of Typhon months ago, after searching for it for years. And even though it’s one of the only things that could make Hawk King vulnerable, you never turned it over to him, your supposed idol.
“Why wouldn’t you? Unless you needed an ace up your sleeve—or a dagger? You had to destroy Asteroid Zed because my investigation would take me to Gil Gamoid and the N-Kid, and you had no way of knowing whether their Qosmic Qonsciousness might’ve picked up on what you’d done, or the attack that L-Raunzenu was planning, the one that no one but you and Hawk King knew about!”
“L-Raunzenu? What in God’s—you’re truly deranged, do you know that, Edgerton?”
“And you also couldn’t risk me finding out that Menton and Sarah Bellum’d been moved. You were using them for your dimensional research, right? I mean, one of your holding companies owns Tachyon Tower! Sarah Bellum probably burned out or died, so you went back to the store for something with a little bit more kick. And who better to arrange the destruction of Asteroid Zed than the head of the company that retrofitted it after Gil, the Kid, and Menton were transferred there in the first place, and the head of the corporation that ran the Asteroid after the kot-tam thing was privatized? You’d think—”
A crash. Huffing. Cracking.
The lights seeped back on, emergency lights in red and the dimensional portal in purple.
The Flying Squirrel was standing over the cloaked body of the Dark Fantastic, all of whose limbs were pointing in directions they shouldn’t have been. And right beside them stood the X-Man.
Kareem shouted something in an alien tongue, and four black baboons smoked into life and leapt on Festus, ripping at him, biting him, shredding his utility pouches and smashing whatever components they could find. The Squirrel whirled to fight off his attackers until he crashed into Kareem, knocking him down and sitting on top of him and reaching through the arms of his simian attackers to remove from his own neck the last item of Squirreltech he still had in his possession—a collar—which he locked around Kareem’s neck.
The baboons disappeared.
Kareem punched Festus in the face, heaved, and shoved the old man off of him, struggling to get the shackle off his neck. He couldn’t. “What’d you do to me?”
Barely able to push himself off the floor, the tattered, bleeding, and weaponless Festus, while panting, actually chuckled.
“Something…I whipped up…when you…affirmative-actioned your way into the F*O*O*J. Just in case. Scrambles your brain just enough…to stop you…from making your Words…come true.”
Kareem backed away from the older man as far as he could.
“I don’care what it is,” said Kareem. “Thing’s got a battery—an since this is your first test, you don’t know how long it’ll last against me—”
“Oh…I don’t need long…to kill you.”
Both men were so injured it was remarkable that they could walk at all, yet still they stalked each other, pit bulls in a dog pit, waiting for the chance to rip out the other’s throat.
“I found the footage in your mainframe, Festus. You’re like Nixon—you’re so paranoid, you even bugged yourself!”
“Keep talking, Stepin Fetchit. Keep on using up your breath—”
“Hawk King came out to the Squirrel Tree to talk to you personally, to get you to shut down Tachyon’s dimensional research labs. I read his astronomical notes—my X-falcon found them. He’d been scanning the Nistan Nebula, and he found out that L-Raunzenu was planning to attack Los Ditkos…using the Tachyon Tower’s dimensional portal. But you wouldn’t shut the portal down, would you? Because you had your own plans for keeping that attack secret…and for letting it happen.
“How many people d’you think an L-Raunzenu sneak attack from there could kill? Tallest building in the city, with nothing to block its nightmare-stream? I guess you’d know better than anyone, since Piltdown Psychotronics spent a billion tax dollars to create fuckin L-Raunzenu in the eighties. Your ‘master weapon’ in the War on Supervillains…but then L-Raunzenu didn’t work so well in the Götterdämmerung, did it? Unless turning on us, killing us, and escaping into another dimension rank as high quality control in your estimation…”
The two men were now so close that they were stumbling and tripping to stay just out of grasping range, each one trying to fake out the other—or attack.
“So what did Hawk King order you to do?” said Kareem. “Shut down the portal in forty-eight hours or he’d shut it down himself? But hey! The F*O*O*J was collapsing, right? Letting in darkies, letting in gays, just before its most important election ever…Plus, you couldn’t just stand by and let a little thing like global peace threaten the multibillion-dollar Pilt-Dyne defense contracts supplying the F*O*O*J, could you?
“So you needed something, something big, an interdimensional Pearl Harbor, to j
ustify a new Götterdämmerung. A permanent one! With sweeping new powers for the F*O*O*J and for yourself, with you as Director of Operations! That’s what Gil Gamoid and the N-Kid were trying to warn me about, only they were so fuckin cracked they could hardly string a coherent sentence together! And so what if a few thousand people’d die? I mean, they’d die anyway someday, right? And it’s a small price to pay for Piltdown!
“But I’m gonna shut down this portal, Festus, if I have to use your skull like a fucking hammer to do it!”
Finally finding the right combination of buttons, I patched through on the speakerphone of the Brotherfly’s belt.
“Kareem—please! You need help! Let me help you!”
“Doc? What the hell are you—”
The Squirrel leapt on him, and the two men smashed each other against the walls, the machinery, the floor. The large man rolled on top of Kareem, punching him and ramming his head into the floor. And then the collar snapped open and fell off the younger man’s neck.
Kareem yelled, “GIANT FIST!”
A black fist the size of a tank arced down from the ceiling, smashing through the portal and destroying it, shearing through the floor and ripping open a huge hole in the wall extending to the level below and revealing the dark emptiness beyond. Ruptured by the impact, the metal floor buckled into an impromptu slide, and the two men, locked in each other’s arms, shot outside into a 150-story plunge.
Exterior cameras caught strobing images of their descent:
145th floor: two bodies—
130th floor: tumbling feet-over-head in darkness—
105th floor: X-Man punching Festus—
70th floor: Festus doing nothing but gripping Kareem’s mouth shut—
25th floor: And a streak of light and one body still falling—
And a sonic boom that erased the impact.
Reintegration
An hour later I was at the base of the Tachyon Tower in the hot darkness and the glare of emergency vehicle flashers and television cameras, watching three injured but still-standing members of the F*O*O*J issue their statement to soothe a concerned country and a worried world.
“…and thanks to the superior strategic and defensive capacity of this organization,” said Festus Piltdown III, scratched and scarred but no longer bleeding, “once again, the F*O*O*J has saved America from the threat of supervillainy…a sleeper agent who was among us for years, part of a diabolical plot to infiltrate the highest levels of F*O*O*J authority. A sleeper working for a previously unknown network of new supervillains, stretching across the planet…and right here in the homes of America—”
Festus broke off in midinspiration, visibly angry at the sight of a swaying Omnipotent Man (his face still tinted blue) who was alternating between flashing “thumbs up” and “double guns” toward the cameras. Covering the microphones, he leaned away from the podium and growled something to Hnossi, who steadied Wally.
Leaning back to the microphone, Festus said, “Understandably, we’re all exhausted. But our exhaustion, our injuries, even the sacrifice of our fellow F*O*O*Jsters and other brothers-in-capes who perished tonight…this is a small price to pay for preserving the liberty of our great nation, the greatest nation on this planet. Thank you.
“No questions.”
EPILOGUE
Be a Phoenix, Not a Dodo
The Prize of Victory
As you have seen throughout Unmasked! When Being a Superhero Can’t Save You from Yourself, the struggle to achieve psychemotional wellness is far from hopeless. If you can muster all the members of your internal superteam and rally under the strategic command of the methods outlined in these pages, victory can indeed be yours.
You have learned that the vulnerability you experience in the face of the greatest threats in your life originates in your own self-defeating behaviors. You have seen how your worst suffering originates inside your refusal to accept inevitable defeats. But when you choose to embrace such defeats, you will achieve prizes that no villain, external or internal, can ever wrench from your gloved and mighty hands: the shield of clarity and the sword of acceptance.
Avoiding Extinction When the Food Supply Ends
As a superhero, you dared to devote your life to saving others. As a reader of this book who has borne witness to the case studies within it, you have come to see that the reward for superheroic public service is usually nothing more than public adulation.
So when, as all things must, that adulation disappears, you come to see that the far greater daring is in the effort to save yourself. However, if the world has changed around you, you may find yourself without an environment that can support you. If so, and if you fail to examine your psychemotional circumstances, you may go the way of the dodo.
Buy mythology teaches that even if you face total burnout, you can still be a phoenix.
Since the end of the Götterdämmerung, the heroes who have been entrusted into my care have come to me in two types, as distinguished by their attitudes: dodos and phoenixes. The dodos could not adapt to the new, exterior demands of a dynamically changing world and the intrinsic reorientation required to exist in that world, and therefore their own refusal to change led them to their ends.
But even those who were terrified by change, who nonetheless found the courage to seek psychic safety within, discovered their capacity to survive and even thrive in a world being re-created daily.
The Tragedy of a Fallen F*O*O*Jster
Whether because of the fantastical, delusional ideation of Racialized Narcissistic Projection Neurosis, or because he was acting on the orders of his masters in the recently revealed Neo-Villain Network, Philip Kareem Edgerton, VKA the X-Man, posed a grave threat to the United States. His near-ascendancy to executive authority on the F*L*A*C of the F*O*O*J remains a cautionary tale, a dodged bullet whose kablam! still rings fear in the ears of the nation.
The F*O*O*J’s special investigative task force concluded that Edgerton himself had murdered Hawk King, then exploited that murder to boost his electoral hopes. When his ascent to power failed, he exploded his Plan B in the July 16 Attacks.
For such a diabolical operative, Edgerton was ultimately incompetent in terror, surprisingly typical of one trapped in an id-reflexive conflict loop. The task force discovered that the bombs Edgerton had planted at the Fortress of Freedom were so shabbily constructed that the chemicals they contained had been improperly mixed, which resulted in them emitting only knockout gas instead of lethal fireballs, except for the “X-bombs” that destroyed the Fortress’s comm system.
More worrisome was the task force’s discovery of Edgerton’s previously unknown capacity for mind control, a variant of his logoid power. Edgerton used it to bludgeon a false “confession” from the Brotherfly. Another victim of that power was Tran Chi Hanh, as disabled by dodo tendencies as his confederate was, who died hating the man who had given him a home and who had treated him like a son.
Ultimately, the task force was unable to find a shred of evidence linking Hawk King to one professor Jackson Rogers of Ellison Heights, Los Ditkos, who coincidentally disappeared the same day Hawk King died. While the task forced declared it had insufficient evidence to link Edgerton to Rogers’s disappearance, suspicions remain.
Fortunately for everyone, the containment of the QRIB was accomplished with only minimal casualties; aside from the members of the L*A*B, only a few dozen families died from fire or smoke, a statistic all the more remarkable when compared to the far greater number of homes destroyed. More lives might have been lost had firefighters not been ordered by the Spook to stay clear of their equipment for fear that they, too, could become targets of the L*A*Bsters.
Healing the Nation, Healing the Soul
Fortunately for the plight of both freedom and mental health, most of my F*O*O*Jsters did learn the lessons I attempted to impart to them in the Hyper-Potentiality Clinic. Some, in fact, were learning those lessons before our sessions began, recognizing the ways in which they would need to lo
ok past old ways of thinking, to make embassies of peace to those who previously had been adversaries, and to re-create themselves anew in a new world.
Explaining to the F*O*O*J special task force that Menton had been clandestinely transferred to the Tachyon Tower to serve in the highest level of Global Anti-Supervillain Intelligence, the Flying Squirrel demonstrated how the top-secret new Menton Protocols of GASI had helped the F*O*O*J keep tabs on all new developing hyper-threats everywhere, from scanning the minds of seemingly innocent Americans to checking what books they were reading and with whom they were socializing, all in order to preempt the development of the next generation of supervillains.
By Menton’s analysis, the situation is disturbing.
There are somewhere in the neighborhood of six million Americans with protovillain tendencies, and hundreds of millions with such tendencies around the world, not to mention those who are already acting upon such malevolent ideation. A grateful public has embraced this new “Mentology” surveillance service, which ensures safety by stopping villainy before it can kill, so that, in the words of the Flying Squirrel, “the smoking gun is not a laser cannon burning down Los Ditkos.”
The New Horizons of Psychemotional Stability
So how are my sanity-supplicants doing, now that they’ve completed the first phase of their therapeutic adventure?
POWER GRRRL continues to process her narcissistic ideation and behaviors but has entirely overcome her Munchausen tendencies. Having left the F*O*O*J and superheroics altogether, she has moved her entertainment career completely out of the pop/dance/techno field, and is currently delving into an edgier, angrier “rap/hip-hop” sound with a forthcoming album, Straight Outta Virgins. Since the events of July 16, she has refused to speak to the media about Edgerton.
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