Sebastian Pop
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Hanzo's Side Trips in the Far Future - Invincible
🕑 Added 2024-04-28 21:25:44 +0000 UTCJust something I sketched out in a couple of afternoons, while taking a break. A random idea about what Hanzo, the protagonists of Understanding Does Not Presage Peace, might stumble over while roaming the dimensions in search of anti-slider countermeasures.
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Inviolable
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“Good god, not another one of these.”
Invincible turned from where he was admiring the Earth to gape at the man who’d just appeared where Allen the Alien had not so long ago been sitting. And standing. Breathlessly.
On the Moon.
“I swear, it’s like someone planned it so these world-braids all rolled up in the same tangled ball. It’s one of those synchronicity-heavy universes too, I came out right where someone just happens to be standing in defiance of all common sense. This is just perfect. Hey kid, I don’t suppose you happen to be one of them omnidisciplinary genius types in complete defiance of your choice of spandex?”
“Wh-what’s that supposed to mean? Who are you?! Where did you come from? How – how are we talking? How are we breathing?”
“I always bring some atmosphere with me, long as you don’t go more than ten meters away you’re fine.” The big man scratched his beard. It was red. So was his hair. “My name’s Miron. I jumped from a different dimension to get here. Or different world-line, depending on whether that’s really the Earth down there or not. Could I bother you for an answer to my question now?”
Mark stared. “This day just keeps getting weirder.”
“Well, that answers that.”
Now Mark felt offended. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Since you’re not a robot or in power armor, you’re clearly not one of those ‘right gadget for any situation’ tech types. You’re also not trying to pull mind games while you figure me out or call for backup, so you’re very likely not one of the other hyper-intellect types either. I don’t suppose you know someone like that, though?”
Mark stared. “I seriously have no idea what you’re talking about.”
The man pinched his nose. “Okay.” He then ambled over and held out a hand. “Let’s try this again. My name’s Miron and I’m originally from Ireland, though not yours. I assume you have one.”
Mark straightened, trying to be as discreet as possible about hovering on the moon dust that had sunk under his weight. The guy was big, taller than him and a lot broader too, bigger than even his dad. He shook his hand. It was also way big. “I’m Invincible, Defender of Earth.” Crap, that sounded corny as all hell, didn’t it?
Miron looked at him with a flat stare of recognition, then let go of his hand to pinch his nose. “I thought I recognized the outfit, damn.”
“You know about me?” He was known in other dimensions? Or his costume was? What?
“Something like that.” Miron dropped his hand. “Ok, I definitely won’t find what I’m looking for here.”
“What are you here for, er… sir?”
“Knowledge on interdimensional or para-cosmic travel, and specifically how to block it,” the man candidly answered. “I’ve got the mystical side more or less covered back home, and a fair range in the scientific one too. But it never hurts to add new perspectives, and I had the time free. Unfortunately, from what I know of this branch you’re practically the hotspot for incursions, and nobody ever tries to find a way to stop them wholesale. Unless I’m wrong and you do? Have you ever heard about The Bleed, for example?”
“…No? Look man, I’m really not the right person to ask any of this, I barely just started.” Immediately, Mark cringed at his slip, but come on? This was beyond surreal, right? No, wait, why the hell was he saying ‘barely’, it’d been five months, almost half a year! He wasn’t a rookie anymore! “I might know a guy though.”
“Is he a robot?”
“… Yeah?” This guy really did know stuff he shouldn’t.
There was silence. The guy didn’t ask more questions. He didn’t volunteer any more information. He didn’t make more requests. He didn’t leave.
Mark began to feel wary. “Right. Well… What now? Do you need help? Do you need to get to Earth, to leave, what…?
“I find myself in a moral quandary.”
Mark tensed. “What’s that?”
“On the one hand, it’s best for me to leave as soon as possible, lest I somehow get myself and my world entangled in the absolutely ridiculous number of interdimensional, multiversal and time travel messes that always happen here. We’ve got enough of that already, please and no thank you.”
That was good, right? Good for Mark and Earth at least – wait, no, did he just say the Earth was under threat by dimensional invaders-?
“On the other hand, if I don’t do anything with what little stuff I do know about this branch, a lot of horrible things will happen up to mass murder, genocide and rape. What do you think I should do?”
“What kind of question is that?!” Mark snapped automatically, his wariness suddenly swept away by outrage. “Are you kidding? Of course you should do something, what kind person are you?”
“Do you always fly off the handle like that?” The man asked dryly. “What kind of person are you?”
Mark grit his teeth and took a calming breath. “One that doesn’t take kindly to people who could do the right thing but choose not to.”
“Well alright then.”
Mark suddenly felt unable to move.
“Since you’re so decisive about what others should do and never mind their own opinion, I’ll respond in kind.”
Wha-?
“I’ve locked the energy state of the air around you, you won’t be able to move until I let you.”
Shit!
“I really don’t know much about this reality, it wasn’t among my interests so I only know what I found out incidentally from others. Fulcrums like you, though, there’s always more under the surface.” The man put a hand over his chest and grabbed him by the head with the other. “With all these convergent and adjacent realities, maybe you’re lucky and I don’t need to run my mouth about things I don’t know enough about.”
Mark struggled to get free, to punch, to fly away, to move, dammit move-
“And it seems the event that seeped awareness of you across realities has already happened, and it was exactly what I hoped – reincarnation. More specifically, yours.” The man’s voice was full of grim satisfaction. “I’m going to do you a favor no one ever did me, kid. Try to live well.”
Something reached in him, through him to something that was more him than anything else, and pulled a knot.
Markus Sebastian Grayson fell down with a gasp and a moan.
His consciousness was obliterated under a sudden flood of memories that were as foreign as they were familiar, and spanned a period of time many times longer than all the years he’d been alive.
“-. Mark Grayson .-“
I gasped back to consciousness somewhere high up in Earth’s atmosphere.
“Mark!”
I abruptly decelerated and realized I wasn’t flying on my own. I was being carried by someone. By…
“Mark, are you alright?” Nolan Grayson demanded in a fretful tone, switching me from a fireman to a princess carry. “I searched space for hours, I only found you because Cecil directed me to an all-new anomaly on the surface of the Moon, what happened?”
“… Holy shit.”
“What, son, what happened? Why were you unconscious? Did that alien do this to you?”
“Who? What alien – oh, Allen?”
“Allen? Who’s Allen?”
“The guy you sent me to fight, I-“ My vision blurred as images of Allen from dozens of different perspectives flashed through my head at once.
“That’s it, I’m taking you home.”
“No, no, it’s alright, Dad, I can fly on my own.”
Somehow, I didn’t make a liar of myself. Dad watched me the whole time as if I was about to faint again at any moment, but we made it home without further incident.
Somehow, we were still in time for dinner, if just barely.
Memories from dozens of different lives flowed together again, when I saw the food spread, but it was easier this time. Also, I was already sitting down when they spilled over, so that helped. I remembered what the rest of the day would have been like, had that strange man not shown up. I’d have tested just how much I could hold my breath in a vacuum, just to enjoy the sight of Earth from orbit for as long as possible. In some lives, I even went to the Earth and back just to refresh my air supply for another view. Several times.
“So,” Debbie Grayson broke the silence when Dad proved too preoccupied quietly fretting over me, unlike what I vaguely remembered should have happened by now. “How did it go, today? Nolan? Mark?”
“With what?” I asked distractedly. “Oh, the fight in space? Not bad at all. He won’t be back. Turns out he’s been coming to the wrong planet all this time, every three years for nearly fifteen years. I’m glad I took the time to talk to him.”
Dad finally seemed to snap out of whatever it was. He visibly decided whether to press, eventually deciding not to. “Well Damn, son, I’m impressed. I wish you’d been around the first time I fought him.”
“Sounds to me like someone at this table should start using his brains a little more often than his brawn,” Mom teased Dad, instead of waiting for me to excuse myself like I… vaguely remembered it going originally. Second-hand.
From drawings on a page.
“Oh come on, how was I supposed to-?”
“Our son did.”
Dad sipped his milk. “Beginner’s luck.”
“Sorry I worried you, Dad,” I said when the latest rush of many alternate memories settled. “And sorry too, Mom, if not for this Dad would’ve been home early today. I know how rarely that happens.”
“I’m just glad you’re alright, Mark.” Mom, as always, maintained her façade of strength with all aplomb. “Now pass the potatoes.”
I passed the potatoes, pretending I didn’t see through her act, as usual. “Still, I feel really dumb. Falling unconscious on the moon, who does that?”
“Someone with a lot of willpower, if little else,” Dad smirked. “Not many can claim to be able to override their need to breathe. I can hold my breath for two weeks, but I doubt I could hold it until I passed out like that. From what I saw, you just fainted right where you were, no fall crater, barely any more streaks in the dust than if you’d turned over in your sleep, you didn’t even begin to fly back to Earth when it happened.”
I stayed silent, despite how embarrassed I felt. I wasn’t ready to share what happened with the strange man, I – I just needed to get my head around it first. Most of all, I didn’t…
I didn’t know if I was talking to Nolan or Nowl-Ahn.
“Well, it was for the best in the end,” Dad said when I wouldn’t speak. “Had you passed out somewhere in space, I’d have had a hell of a time finding you. Contrary to popular belief, us viltrumites don’t actually have telescopic vision.”
Or heat vision, x-ray vision, super breath, freeze breath, super hearing, as far as Superman deconstructions went, we were kind of nerfed. Not that I felt all that short-changed about it. I was more suspicious of the various secondary powers that were conspicuously absent from the narrative that was my life.
Chiefly, super reflexes.
The way spaceflight-capable beings just managed to find and intercept each other in the vastness of space was another glaring hole in the logic of reality, with how often it happened without any high-tech equipment to guide them. Us.
Me.
“Well, thanks for the food mom, it was great. I’ve got school tomorrow, though, and I‘m beat. I’m gonna turn in now.”
“At least make sure you rinse your plate.”
“Don’t worry, I’ve got it.”
I took my plate to the kitchen and washed it thoroughly. I then looked at the dish pile. I cracked my knuckles.
I managed to get it all cleaned and squared away in less than thirty seconds, despite being careful not to stress any of the plates and pans. Viltrumite hand-eye coordination did, it seemed, scale up alongside our speed. I also accounted intuitively for the enhanced forces, frictions and heat generated by my movements, as well as the little issue of water not having time to fall and soak at that speed. Especially the thicker oil grime.
Dry scraping and vibration did more for the pans than the soap, and for rinsing I couldn’t get any benefit form my superspeed at all. I had to wait for the tap to flow like everyone else.
Tap water, I thought darkly. Unless Cecil Stedman was lying, American tap water is laced with a chemical that makes it impossible for people to see certain frequencies of light.
As far as plot devices go, it was a real hair-pulled. It only got worse when you considered that I was a viltrumite, not human. Part-viltrumite, but viltrumite genetics overpower all others, so it was the same thing. Since the white room was my bane in a lot of the lives I now recalled, even well into the future, that meant it worked on viltrumites as well as it did everyone else.
I need to have a talk with Eve.
That would have to wait until tomorrow, though. For now, the matter of my super reflexes – or lack thereof – still required my attention. From all I’d just felt and seen during my dishwashing training montage, it felt as if all the pre-requisites of super reflexes were there.
So why could I still get sucker punched?
By random goons too.
I pondered that question on the way to my room upstairs. Even if someone got a hit in, I should be ale to react mid-way through and keep myself in pace with my flight, at least. The Mauler twins shouldn’t have been able to bounce me from wall to ceiling with a single backhand.
I entered my room. I took it in. I looked down at my homework. Physics and world history.
I dropped on my belly and began to write. And think.
Physics didn’t go any faster than before, whatever the weird man did to me didn’t come with any sort of knowledge dump. Just dozens and dozens of flashes of memory of me doing this before, each one filling in one detail or answer so that I practically filled everything in more from memory than problem-solving ability. It was convenient, but not particularly useful for the future.
World History was even weirder. My head swam with factoids from a whole bunch of different lives, and most of them were the same. And accurate to the textbook, as I found after double-checking. Except in those cases where they weren’t, but only because I found out the real version of events later, in some of the alternate timelines I lived.
In the future.
Except that according some of the stuff I learned in the not-future, alternate timelines might just be past timelines that got reset. Somehow. For some reason. I certainly wouldn’t be able to remember them if they hadn’t occurred at some point. Not if the man on the moon was serious about this all boiling down to reincarnation. Pas life memories.
When I was done with my homework, I laid back on my bed and closed my eyes to think. Consider. Imagine. Wonder what the hell I was going to do.
Trying and failing not to have an existential crisis.
My head swam with memories of living this life. And parallel lives. Sometimes I was good, a lot of times I was bad. Some lives ended quick, some ended much later, some didn’t end at all and the memories just cut off after a certain point. Sometimes it was because I died, sometimes the world ended, sometimes a glowing tentacle monster threw me to the past, or that’s what it made me think. A lot of the memories of these… alternate universe selves? They just ended with no explanation.
Conversely, I remembered how some would go for the next few years, but not what happened until now. Since some of them had me as a loyal viltrumite empire soldier, though, maybe it was for the best.
There was barely any emotional weight to any of the memories. As if… they were just second-hand or third-person experiences, like a game. Others felt as if I’d just… recovered from amnesia only to find that who I was before didn’t matter compared to who I was now. Because there were eighteen years of full, vivid memories of life between then and now.
I could practically feel my perspective changing, though, with every bit of information and recollection that slotted in. Felt my perspective broaden with… experience. Especially when it came to myself. I…
I had something of a temper, didn’t I?
Beyond all that, though, there was one other life. A life lived in a world without superheroes at all, or anything abnormal. Nothing extraordinary, except maybe the sheer depth of pettiness that humans could get up to when not constantly tested by existential terrors. In that life, I was just a human. Like everyone else. Just a regular guy.
A regular guy who’d once read a comic book called Invincible.
A comic book that predicted mass murder, genocide and rape.
My rape.
And, somehow, even worse.
I rolled over in bed.
If nothing changed, at some point I’d be a victim of Anissa.
None of the lives I now remembered included a memory of that. They all cut off before anything like that happened. Maybe just before that would have happened. For that alone I was willing to believe that the man on the moon – Miron – really did mean well by doing this to me. Revealing this to me.
Warning me.
I rolled over on my other side. I tried to sleep. I couldn’t.
I needed to figure things out. I needed to plan. But I wasn’t in the right headspace to plan. I needed to clear my head.
I got out of bed, put on my costume, flew out the window and straight up into space.
There should have been more heat. More heat than on escape velocity, which I exceeded in seconds. There wasn’t even enough heat to compare to re-entry. I reached space in minutes, with no damage to my can-be-punched-through-by-random-mooks suit. Just like the first time.
I’ll make one flight around the world.
Or three. Or ten. As fast as I could.
By the end, either my mind will have settled or I’ll be too tired to care and finally able to get some sleep.
“-. Nolan Grayson .-“
His son was lying.
He may have told the truth about Allen the Alien, but Nolan didn’t believe for a second that he just passed out on the Moon because he was too starstruck by the view. Mark was bad at making excuses, yes, but only because he so rarely had to make any, and almost never did because he accepted responsibility instead. He technically didn’t try this time either.
But he did skirt around the topic, letting Debbie and him draw their own conclusions.
Mark also didn’t seem to be aware that he’d been encased in an air bubble up until the moment Nolan entered it, at which point it dispersed. It left no trace of its existence behind, at least nothing like a device.
Mark hadn’t passed out from suffocation. Something else had happened to him. Or someone.
Someone strong or fast enough to take him down without him being able to throw a single punch in return. Someone so far beyond him that they didn’t even need to bruise him to prove a point. Someone that did something to Mark, or said something to him, to keep him silent. Or maybe they took him down before he even knew what was happening and Mark had just convinced himself he’d run out of air.
There were things in the known universe that could do some of that to a viltrumite, especially one who’d just come into his powers. More than the Empire knew of.
But of the one or two on Earth who might have managed it through a surprise attack – and had a dubious enough nature that they might try something – none of them were space capable. At least, not in such a brief time window.
Logic dictated, then, that it wasn’t someone from Earth.
So. Either this Allen had done it, or something else. Someone else. Someone who could overcome Mark despite all his abilities, however fresh and unpracticed. Someone, maybe, who had his same abilities which were properly practiced. In which case…
This was a message.
A message not to his son, but to him.
…
If that was true, then he was out of time.
He couldn’t afford to dawdle anymore.
Comments
Zerak
I love how people tend to interpret things from their world view. Too often authors don’t show characters reacting in a way appropriate to the info they have and their world view.
Judah Frankel
Given that Mark’s reincarnate memories mainly seem to kick in when he personally encounters an individual or event, I really want to see his reaction when he re-meets Eve for the first time post-awakening.
