Yesterday - Markus
Markus despised his biological father.
A bit of understatement, given what had gone down the last time they'd been under the same rough (for the few minutes there
had been a roof before their fight obliterated it), but it needed saying.
He wanted nothing to do with Mark Grayson, with his empire and his viltrumites,
nothing.
Nada. Nill. Zilch. Nix. Honestly, he could go on.
The optimistic preachers that were a dime a dozen back home could go on about the importance of family and forgiveness and all that kumbaya-flavored babble, but Markus was having any of it. He'd already tried that - had loved his father, idolized him, all but worshiped him and his heroic holier-than-thou propaganda
bullshit and in the end -
"What- No, no, no, that's - My mother - You're lying! She couldn't have-!"
"Markus-"
"That's- that's why you left me, isn't it? That's why you abandoned me?!
"Son, please-"
"Don't call me that! I hate you! IhateyouIhateyouihateyou!" -
Yeah,
no.
That fun (poisonous) little memory was going right back in the metaphorical box and getting crammed as far down the recesses of mind as he could get it to go.
Stuff happened, shit went down. He stopped crying about it a
long, long time ago.
The point here, the great important takeaway that he'd learned the hard way was that getting involved in his sperm donor's life - even by proxy - was a recipe for
disaster. The kind that inevitably ended in big, ugly dramatic messes that made him feel things he didn't want to feel and landed him in positions that were even worse than what he'd started off with, and he was never in a good spot to begin with.
That's why his first thought upon waking up in the middle of a massive crater in the middle of who-knew where with nothing but his living nightmare of a half-sister, the shattered remains of her ship and the sight of the
broken moon up in the sky above was something along the lines of "Yeah, that fucking
tracks."
Still, relatively unsurprising didn't mean it wasn't bad, and him being jaded about this kind of crap didn't mean he wasn't alarmed as
fuck. He'd seen the fallout of some ridiculous circumstances before - Earth was host to so many varied flavors of superpowered beings, entitled maniacs and so many other breeds of wacky insanity that it was effectively impossible not to, but what he was seeing was on an entirely different
level.
Collateral damage was always a risk, but there were
limits.
The worst he'd ever seen was New York City nearly burnt to the ground by the army of
Magmaniac clones (and that was a whole other story that Immortal just wouldn't let him hear the end of) but a
moon?
Seriously?
Right, first things first. Figuring out where the hell they were.
He stood up, ignoring the seeping exhaustion - he'd only just started healing and he still felt weak at the knees and fragile in a way he'd only ever felt at his worst - and hovered up out of the bottom of the crater to take a look around.
They were in a forest of sorts, far out of the way of any hint of civilization he could hope to spot, and that was probably for the best. Whether or not they were on
Earth specifically was still up for questioning but humans and aliens alike tended to have a shared habit of getting real pissy when space-ships dropped out of the sky and blew up their surroundings well and good, so landing in the middle of nowhere was - tentatively speaking - a good thing.
The air was perfectly breathable, but that meant jack - half the planets in the galaxy had human-friendly atmospheres and viltrumite physiology made most of the ones that didn't a non-issue. Markus could breathe pure carbon monoxide without batting an eye.
He peered up again. The sun was beginning to glint up ahead, but the sky remained a shade too dark and it had nothing to do with the cold weather he could feel (distantly - the cold hasn't bothered him since he was five).
Debris.
He was no meteorologist, but he wasn't an idiot either. He could put two and two together. Earth or not, if a moon that large was broken apart by whatever means, there was going to be a god-awful build-up of shattered debris in Earth's orbit. Best case scenario - there'd be enough to fuck over weather patterns for the foreseeable future.
Worst case? The whole planet was in for another ice age.
Wonderful.
He dropped back down into the crater and landed beside Terra, nudging her with her foot.
"Oi. Get the hell up."
No response.
He sighed.
They needed to figure out how bad the situation was, how they could help and how they could get home as soon as possible.
Maybe not exactly in that order, depending on how shitty this place turned out to be - he wasn't going to prioritize the effort of saving a world devoid of intelligent life without finding a way home first.
"Terra. Terra!" He leaned down and shook her again, but aside from her rhythmic breathing and her minute shifting, she may as well have been dead to the world.
He needed to start answering questions, start working out just what kind of fiasco they'd been dropped in, but if she wasn't going to wake up…He couldn't just leave her here - Eternally annoying she may be, but nothing good would come his way if he left his
relatively helpless sister to fend for herself
He glared down at her.
"I'm going to have to carry you, aren't I?"
No response.
"Yeah, I figured. Ever and always a pain in my ass, even when you're unconscious. Typical."
...
It took him about twenty minutes to conclusively prove that they were on an alternate Earth.
It was more luck than anything. He slung Terra over one shoulder, raised himself into the air, picked a direction on a whim and rocketed off at supersonic speeds, the air audibly cracking behind him.
His flight was a little choppy, a little stilted, the lingering exhaustion still weighing him down, but it still took less than half an hour to burst through a thick bank of clouds and spotting a road stretching out far beneath him, a few cars crisscrossing in opposite directions below. He followed it in a straight line for a little while more, and lo and behold, a city rose in the distance, complete with a massive billboard and everything.
Welcome to Beautiful Brockton Bay
And then beneath those words, an artistic rendition of the apparent coastal city and another title below that.
Home of the Protectorate E.N.E Headquarters
… huh
He's never heard of either of those - Brockton Bay or the Protectorate. But a brief glimpse at the streets below was enough to confirm that this was a human city, so alternate Earth it was.
Good. It was a little selfish, but he was plenty relieved that it wasn't
his moon that'd somehow been blown up.
Now all he had to do was figure out what the hell was going on here.
He had no idea what the protectorate was supposed to be, but from the title… some kind of law enforcement agency? This Earth's counterpart of the Global Defense Agency? or maybe just the local authorities?
Questions for later - and by later, he meant the very second he found a computer with an internet connection he could abuse. A public library should do the trick.
Assuming there was one, and that he could find it.
Briefly, he debated simply dropping down to the streets and asking for directions or something, but he discarded that thought almost immediately. He didn't know what he was working with here and Terra was still dead to the world. Walking up to a local while lugging an unconscious girl over his shoulder would get him all the wrong kinds of attention, and fast.
No, it's not what it looks like, I promise! She's just my bitch of a sister!
He snorted.
How about no?
Already, people below were starting to look up, some of them whipping out phones and pointing his way - he'd stayed still too long.
With another resigned sigh he doubled his grip on Terra and accelerated, driving himself deeper into the city.
Yeah, today was going to be all kinds of
fun, wasn't it?
...
He'd dropped into a street a few blocks away, taking advantage of the fact that there were very few people out and about - ridiculously few, actually, given the relatively impressive size of the city - and resigned himself to finding a nice, isolated corner or someplace where he could stash Terra for at least a little while.
He'd expected to leave her there for a little while until he could get some directions at least.
Instead, just as soon as he'd tucked her away at the edge of a clearly abandoned building's rooftop (The whole building could collapse and she wouldn't get the equivalent of a paper cut), the very first person he'd met - an old man who'd eyed him up and down before glaring at him distrustfully pointed out the directions to Brockton Bay's Central Library clearly hoping to get rid of him.
That had been easy.
"Thanks, I owe you one." He smiled half-heartedly, and the old man shrugged and adjusted his coat a little.
"S'nothing." He grunted, before shooting him a strange look. "You're a cape, aren't you? Must be, if you're dressed like that."
"...Cape?" Belatedly he remembered that he was still wearing his suit. His super suit. "Uh… you mean, do I have powers?"
"No shit." He gave Markus a look that made it
very clear how stupid he thought he was. "Never seen a cape without one of those fancy masks on, 'cept those New Wave people. You one of them?"
Capes, huh?
"New Wave? Don't know they are." Markus shrugged and tried to play it off in the face of the next odd look that came his way. "Sorry, I'm not really from around here. And as for my mask-"
Lie or no lie? He settled for a bastardized truth instead.
"Can't say I really see the point of masks."
Strangely enough, that got him a smile. A genuine smile, but one tinged with rueful amusement and something dark enough to momentarily set his teeth on edge.
"Guess you're right. No point hiding behind masks anymore, eh? Not when the whole world is ending.' The old man snorted, and the sound was just a tad bit hysterical. "The Moon and the Golden Man… they were just the start, you hear? Won't be long before the rest of us follow, I tell you."
"..."
Markus opened his mouth, then closed it again. What exactly was he supposed to say to that? He didn't have any context to answer that nihilistic speech even if he wanted it to.
Luckily, he didn't have to. The old man shouldered past him and went his not-so-merry way, still muttering darkly and leaving Markus to stare after him in growing concern before he took off and went to pick up Terra.
On his way, he made a mental note to look into the 'Golden Man', whoever the hell he was.
Dumb name that
...
An hour later or so later - Brockton Bay's Central Library
The library was empty - and also closed, but it didn't take even an iota of effort to break in through the door.
The relative seclusion and the clear absence of any kind of alarm worked wonders for him, honestly, because he managed to tuck Terra onto a couch and get into the public computer lab without a hitch.
That was about the only good thing he had to say about the next hour of his life because getting onto the internet and looking up this new world, starting from the history of the last century and onwards?
Well.
He only had one solid conclusion.
Somebody
really fucked the dog here
. With
feeling.
Earth Bet, as the locals called it, had a history that read like it had been written by a sadist with too much time on his hands and a pretty indiscriminate hatred for god-damn
everything.
May 20th, 1981 - The point where the Golden Man, Scion, showed up and ushered in the epic clusterfuck that was the age of Para-humans, and everything was
fantastic… for about five seconds before it all went to hell in a handbasket.
Uncontrollable, uncontainable parahumans. Warlords taking over unstable nations and propping up their own regimes. Villains that outnumbered the heroes ten to one, held back only by a set of unspoken, unwritten arbitrary rules that made life one massive, high-stakes game of
cops and robbers, and the authorities were evidently
okay with that.
"What the hell?" Markus breathed, eyes wide as he scrolled through page after page of this
bullshit.
All that was the mild stuff. He was struggling to process that, let alone the existence of
city-eating goblins, the
literal murder-hobos who apparently drove up and down the country doing whatever the fuck they wanted!, oh, and the
three super-kaiju who destroyed or condemned entire cities on a globally recognized schedule that
had been going for twenty years or so!
The keyboard he'd steadily been pressing down on shattered as his hands went through it, and then through the desk beneath it with the tortured snap of shattered wood.
He barely noticed.
What kind of living hell-hole was this?
He'd be the first to admit that his world was no paradise. They had more villains and monsters than they knew what to do with and the collateral damage and cost in lives the world as a whole suffered could often become incalculable simply by sheer scope, but Earth Bet was downright
demented.
Parahumans ran rampant, the authorities conclusively had nothing to do with them, and the heroes had clearly been fighting a losing battle for decades.
In fact, he thought grimly,
they probably just lost it.
Four months ago, a tinker (and what the hell were
those supposed to be? Powers that made them make technology no one else could ?
Bullshit. He was calling magic shenanigans) called String Theory tried the US government for 200 million dollars and a number of concessions even he could admit were ridiculous. Or at least, he would have admitted that, before the deranged lunatic threatened to fire off a weapon that could destroy the moon.
Then he would have done the smart, reasonable thing - given the crazy bitch whatever she wanted and then some just until he could figure out a way to deal with her. Instead, the utter fuckwits running this country decided to
call her bluff and order her assassination - they issued something called a kill order, whatever that was, and that was the straw that broke the camel's back...
String Theory died, but not before installing some kind of remote deadman's switch that made her weapon go off well before anyone could disarm it, and ta-
fucking-da!
Kablooey goes to the moon, and soon after that, Scion and some equally important hero called Eidolon up and vanish, presumably in some failed attempt to fix things.
The sheer, suicidal stupidity and incompetence of it all was doing more to raise his blood pressure than his
father ever had, and that was saying something.
Worse, there was no way anyone on Earth Bet could help them get home - He'd read up on Earth Aleph, and how the tinker who'd made that one-time portal had gone and croaked years ago. If anyone had anything even approaching his tech, they weren't making themselves known.
So in summary, he was stuck with the sister he
loathed in a world that had gone so far off the rails it'd been facing complete societal collapse
before the extinction-level event came knocking, with no clear way home and not a clue on what to do next.
…
Mark breathed in deeply and exhaled.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Then he devolved into frenzied screaming and demolished half the building
On the bright side, no one was around to get hurt.
...
Present Time - Terra
Terra put her head in her hands. "What the..?"
Across from her, Markus just shrugged. "Tell me about it."
He'd dragged her out of the library and flew both of them back to their landing (crash-landing?) site, where he'd started burying the remains of her ship without so much as a 'by your leave.'
"Tinkers." He explained when she glared at him. "Don't know how they work - don't know how powers work at all in this shit-hole since they all
somehow have the same source - but giving anyone in this world FTL capable tech is so fucking stupid I wouldn't let it happen even if only to see it blow up in your face."
"Fuck you!" she snapped at him, but she helped him dig anyway.
It was a valid point, even if she'd never say it to his face.
When they were done, she leaned back and admired their work in a grim mood.
She'd
liked her ship. It had character.
"What are we going to do now?"
"No idea.
"We need to do something about the moon."
"No,
really? How do you figure?"
Oh, this
dick.
"Cut the crap!" She whirled on him furiously "We're trapped in a dying world, asshole! The
least you could do is shut up and try to
help!"
"The hell do you want me to do?!" He snarled right back at her, face twisted in outrage. "What, should I fly up there and staple it back together maybe? Maybe I should run down to the store and get some heavy-duty repair tape,
that'll do the trick!"
He pointed up at the shattered celestial object.
"The local heroes have been trying for
months, dumbass! A third of the moon's mass is just
gone, and at least a third more is shattered and building up in orbit around the planet, threatening to bring down a new ice age. That's assuming, of course, that none of the meteors that are
already raining down daily don't surface-wipe the
planet. There's no easy fix here!"
"I don't expect it to be
easy, but we need to start doing something anyway!"
"Oh,
please." Markus snorted derisively and turned his back to her. "Stop pretending you know what you're doing. This mess is out of our league."
"Out of
yours, maybe." Terra gritted her teeth. "This isn't the first doomed world that the Viltrumites have saved. Hell, this isn't the first doomed world that
I've saved. I've fought despots and tyrants, natural disasters and extinction-level events, Marky, all while you were off playing the glorified
mall cop back on Earth. Maybe if you'd actually showed up once in a while, you wouldn't be rolling over like a little
bitch right now."
He whirled on her and she clenched her fists in as blatant a threat as she could give out of outright charging him.
"You want to do this again!?"
"
Don't tempt me."
…
He broke and looked away first, snarling under his breath.
It wasn't an admission of defeat, not even a surrender, but right now, she'd take what she could get.
"Look, there's enough time for us to kick the shit out of each other later. Believe me, I'm looking forward to it." She promised him, ignoring his answering snort, "But right now, we need to figure out how we're going to help, and how we're going to get home. We can head over to the city, make contact with… the Protectorate, you called them, and-"
She stopped.
Markus was looking away from her, the look on his face almost… hesitant.
An orchestra's worth of alarm bells started screaming at the back of her head.
"
What happened?"
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Don't bullshit me and talk. What happened, and why do you look," she gestured to his face, to the expression he wasn't couldn't hide quickly enough. "Like
that."
…
"Fine." He grunted. "After I read up on this world, I kind of lost it. Brought down half the building."
"You already told me this part."
"Yeah, well." He hesitated. "I didn't tell you that after that… I ended up drawing a little attention."
Her stomach dropped.
"What did you do?"
"In my defense - not that I have to defend myself to
you -"
"
What did you do?!"
"-he hit me first!"
...
Yesterday - Markus
Markus ground his jaw as he stared down at the
dead man who'd just lobbed an out-and-out fireball at his face.
"Lung, right?" He snarled through gritted teeth, looking down at the gang leader whose Wiki page he'd skimmed out of idle curiosity. "The dragon-man, right? That's your whole gimmick?"
"I-" The man was already eight feet tall, skin morphing into gleaming silver scales, heat billowing off his form as his clothes burnt from the inside out, but Markus cut him off without a care in the world.
"I have a lot of pent-up aggression that I really need to work off." Markus' tone was almost pleasantly conversational "Say, how durable are you exactly? Asking for a friend?"
"You-!"
And that's about as far as he got before Markus drove his fist into his face, his skull nearly caving in as the viltrumite struck him and sent him bouncing across the street with enough force to crack the asphalt and set off every car alarm in the vicinity.
"Never mind.
I'll figure it out myself."
...
So… Markus has anger issues. Just putting it out there.
As always leave your comments and ideas and if you don't like it please be courteous.
