Blue Oceans, Yellow Sands

Wanna know what being punched across the atmosphere feels like?

The very first punch is the only one that registers. That terrible hammer that strikes you across the chest and sends you flying at a speed of twenty miles per second, filling your mind with nothing but pain and your ears with unworldly howling.

As you're crossing the magnetosphere, your most coherent thought is that outer space smells like raspberries and rum.

By the time the second punch lands, there's no pain. Not really. Your brain has, at that point, shut down every sensation in an attempt to get your subconscious working so it can come up with a viable solution out of this jam. The second punch also serves to further accelerate your fall, helping you reach speeds of more than fifty miles a second.

Right about then, you've started burning up across the mesosphere. The smell of raspberries and rum is replaced by the scent of a burning gas stove. The air tastes like old pennies. If you're wearing spandex, it's flaking off you by now. If you're not as tough as I am, your skin's blistering and popping in places.

The third punch comes as you break through the ozone layer. Your opponent has controlled his descent to avoid burning up and he comes in for the kill. At that moment, you either come up with a plan, in which you swerve slightly to the left and let gravity and the wind toss you a few miles the other way, or you just look at him, mouthing prayers to your God.

If the third blow connects, that means you've done the latter.

The third punch makes you curl up in a ball, the force and the pressure making your body compact in order to make up for the impact. At this point, you have reached terminal velocity and are screaming through the air toward earth, breaking the sound barrier four times over. To a 'baseline' observer, you look like an unbroken black line crossing the horizon, a spontaneous exclamation point to go with the assorted clap of thunder and subsequent roar.

Depending on your body's mass (mostly measured by your invulnerability), you wreak all manner of hell upon crashing. If, for example, you're the White Lord (which means that you're a huge bastard with the mass of a jet airliner and unbreakable skin), expect causing a miniature explosion upon impact that will flatten everything for a radius of 20 miles and will deafen every living thing for 40 miles around the epicenter.

But if you're really, truly invulnerable (like me), then that means that your mass is that of an aircraft carrier. You are also the equivalent of a needle, shot at Earth's skin at supersonic speeds. That means that you're too small for Earth to push back at as you reach the ground upon impact.

Which means that you crash through the ground, your back turning rocks into powder, all the way through the crust and into the planet's mantle, where your fall is broken by an ocean of churning magma.

As you float amongst the dinosaurs, the endless drumming of tectonic forces around you as they move under the skin of the world, you find yourself thinking:

I mustn't let this happen again.

As you feel your body slowly recuperating, your cell structure shifting to mend any broken bones and internal injuries and allow yourself to grow a new cape from your own skin, you ponder:

When the hell did the Moondragon get out of prison?

Letting the magma cauterize the wounds on your face, burning your split lip, you try to come up with a strategy, but all you can come up with is:

I need to punch him before he punches me.

And you know that this isn't much of a plan. Hell, you never needed a plan before. You're Invictus, the Invincible Superhuman! You're a legend of disaster in a million worlds across the cosmos! You've stopped the Twelve Horsemen of the Apocalypse single-handed and you've forced the Chaos Daemon Naraka to yield, holding his heads under the waters of the Sea of Tranquility!

You are reminiscing old victories, when suddenly you turn around and see the Moondragon, grinning at you through the magma, three sets of eyes just looking through twelve layers of impenetrable skin and straight at the terrified little monkey that's your soul, before he wraps his clawed fingers round your neck and applies enough pressure to crack reinforced concrete.

You're not going to suffocate, of course. It's going to be twelve weeks before you even begin feeling dizzy and it's going to take about 2 Terrajoule's worth of force for your neck to snap, but it will shut you up, so you can listen.

The Moondragon mouths the words slowly. He says:

"This was a long time coming."

His eyes are like daggers now, boring into your brain. His grip tightens.

"Twenty years I spent inside the Null-Time Vortex. Twenty years with each second passing at the rate of a week. I spent two centuries trapped inside the darkness and the cold and silence."

You think to yourself: No, no way. You keep repeating, inside your head: There's no way anyone could stay awake this long, anyone that could stay conscious inside the Null-Time Vortex. You remember what Johnny Quantum told you: Perception slows down to adjust to objective time. He won't know the difference.

The Moondragon hears your thoughts, reads them from the surface of your mind. He says:

"My perception never shifted. My conscious self never slowed down. I never adjusted to time inside the Vortex. I was awake, Invictus, for two hundred years. It took me two weeks just to blink, but my mind... oh my mind was working just fine."

The Moondragon starts flying then, pushing you through the magma. You begin to fight back, but he's too strong. Stronger than you, anyway. Always better, faster, smarter.

Heroes always tend to be like that, even the ones that have recently gone on galactic-wide murderous rampages so they can destroy your work of penance for your years of suffering wrought upon others.

"The first year, I went mad. I screamed and the scream took six months to die down. I sat there, listening to the inflection, the tone, and every impossible octave that had come from my mouth. Then, I tried to get out. In thirty years, I managed to strike at the walls of my prison twice, before I gave up. So, I spent another two years crying, cursing at you. I listened to my pathetic, sniveling voice echoing across the Vortex and it was then that I stopped being insane and started getting angry, Invictus."

Inside the outer core, the pressure is making my eardrums pop, pressing down on my skull against the back of my eyes, making both my hearts jump around in my chest. I can still read his lips.

"To stop myself from being poisoned by my own bile, I started counting the motes of meteor dust that were swirling around me, but that didn't help. What I did instead, was try to keep myself occupied: I dreamt, Invictus. Dreamt of my every victory over you, dreamt of our battles, dreamt of our clashes across galaxies. It wasn't long before I found myself forgetting what actually happened and begun replacing everything in them with thoughts of revenge. In my mind, I was killing you in a thousand unspeakable ways."

The world around me begins to fade as he exerts more pressure, the steady thrumming of the universe lost to me for the very first time in my life. There's nothing but his eyes now, his hands round my neck, his lips, speaking condemnation:

"It was on my first century of captivity that I discovered the toll of my hate: I had forgotten. Forgotten my home planet's name and its wonders. Forgotten the woman I had fallen in love with. My adventures, the worlds I had saved, and the civilizations I had rescued. There was only you, Invictus, you and my thoughts of killing you."

As the Earth's Mightiest Sentinel, Guardian of Universe B7 began frothing at the mouth, we smashed our way into the inner core. I felt the tremors radiating outward, disturbing the tectonic plates above us, making the continents shiver. I heard the sound of oceans roiling and volcanoes erupting everywhere all at once. The Equator became a gaping maw, splitting the surface of the planet in two.

"It was only during the second century that I was coherent enough to form a plan: because I knew that killing you would not be enough. I had to ruin you, Invictus; to eradicate your legacy once and for all. So I used what knowledge I could muster and thought of the worlds you had visited, the ones that praised your name, the ones that did not know you as well as I did. When the Vortex collapsed around me and I found the Border Guardians waiting to guide me to the Void Tribunal, I smashed their bodies and dispersed their energy forms. I crossed space and reached the Shining Citadels of Tralfamadore. I burned them with my breath. Next, I boiled the Dream Architects inside their own atmosphere. After that, it was the Hidden Twin Worlds of Aldebaran. They made such a wonderful noise when I crashed them against each other. I watched the poets and the painters and the sculptors spill out into space, their limbs flailing lifelessly, and it felt so good."

Inside the Earth's Core, the Moondragon lets me go. I tumble as I'm pulled by gravity on both sides, using the opposing tugs of gravity to keep myself aloft and find my bearings. The Moondragon levitates over jets of molten iron, the sprays striking his face harmlessly.

"But that wasn't enough now, was it? Because there was one more place left. The planet you had usurped from me, this rock where the apes had crowned you their Mightiest Defender, when once they called you the Irresponsible Superhuman."

Slowly, I catch my breath. I try to ignore the collective cries of six billions souls that watch their world crash and burn around them, calling my name in prayer. I wonder if he can hear them too, crying and screaming up there.

"I can hear them perfectly. I can hear every cry, every wail, every prayer. I can hear the children as they are crushed beneath the rubble and the women as they burn and the men as they choke on sulfur. It's hell up there now, all boiling oceans and a great big starless night that will be forever."

I think of ways I could reason with him, but cannot. There's nothing I can tell the Moondragon that will stop this. There's nothing I can do that will make him change his mind, until it hits me:

"You brought this on yourself." I tell him and his eyes go wider than saucers.

"What?"

"You burned the Vir'Culi armada. You killed the Grey Emperor and his advisors in cold blood."

"They were war criminals! They were butchers and dictators!"

"They were retreating. We had beaten them back, all of us. You and me and the Sentinels. We had made them turn tail. They had surrendered, but you flew after them and killed them. You tore the Grey Emperor apart with your bare hands."

"I showed him greater mercy than he had ever shown!"

"He was unarmed! He had surrendered! He was helpless!" I scream and the Moondragon stops. He knows I am right. He knows that despite all of my crimes, I never once stooped that low. I kept talking, driving the point home:

"You weren't a hero that day. You were a butcher and a killer just like them, or worse. There were children on the Vir'Culi Arks. There were civilians inside the Crimson Citadel."

"I couldn't have known. How could I have known?"

"You can count the revolutions of an electron that's in orbit in Mercury. You can pick up the distant songs of Sunwhales. You knew that there were non-combatants in there and yet you burned them all. How many were there?"

"I don't know... "

"How many were there?" I screamed at him.

"Twenty million." He said but his gaze never wavered. "Twenty million dirty Vir'Culi women and children. They were vaporized, reduced to dust in a micro-second. I saw their ashes scatter all around me and I heard the sounds of their husbands' and fathers' hearts in the warships breaking all around me. It was good."

Oh no.

"They died screaming. They shot at me and saw me smash through the hulls of their Destroyers and they heard me laughing."

No, no, no...

"They were sucked out into the void and the last thing they saw was me smiling as their lungs imploded."

I fly toward the Inner Core, trying to get away. For the first time in a long time, I feel myself scared out of my skin. The Moondragon grabs me by the ankle and throws me against the walls of the Core.

"I tore the Grey Emperor to shreds and drank his blood, and it was good."

His atomic breath washes over me, burning with the intensity of a quasar's furnace heart. The first six layers of my skin peel away, along with my eyelids. I find myself in terrible agony, unable to look away.

"I will kill you now and then I will go to the surface and watch Earth burn. I will pick off the survivors, one by one; kill them with my bare hands, and when they are all dead, I will begin smashing their cities and their records to dust, and when I am done with that, I will vaporize their oceans and tear their magnetosphere and let the radiation and the meteors smash across the surface until the entire planet is nothing but a great broken plain."

My fist crashes against his face with the force of colliding meteors. It makes the Moondragon stumble back, breaking his grip. I press the attack, bringing my fist down on his face again and again, striking at his eyes and throat.

When he strikes back, two of my teeth fly off.

"Your name and your works will be lost. The universe will forget you. I will be victorious, the sole witness to your existence, eternally savoring your true and ultimate death."

I charge him again; a geyser of flame shoots up, masking my presence and I break for the surface. I try not to think, not to let him know what I am about to do.

I hear him roar my name as he flies behind me and I can tell that he already knows.

Thirty seconds later, I've shot through the ground and I'm already crossing the ozone layer, the planet churning and writhing beneath me. I make the mistake of looking back and I see him frothing, framed by cities toppling. Europe burning, disaster orbiting his mad face.

I count the dead without knowing, even as I run away from him, heading for Venus. Twenty million dead beneath me, another hundred thousand dead by the time we cross Lagrange space. I swerve around the moon, slingshotting myself, hoping against hope that it might give me just a bit more speed.

The Moondragon flexes his mind and space collapses around him, crossing the distance in the blink of an eye. He pounces on me and we crash through the great toxic cloud that is Venus' atmosphere into a lake of boiling acid. It burns my face and sets fire to my exposed eyeballs. I try to scream and it rushes inside my stomach, burning me from the inside.

"Looking for your secret weapon? My one and only weakness? The magical trinket that's going to save you?" he says and his fist crashes against me, blows echoing like thunder even in the thin atmosphere. He lets me crawl away from him, enjoying every second.

By the time I've gotten on my feet, there's nearly three hundred million dead. Antarctica is breaking apart and I'm stuck on Venus, looking for the one thing that might give me a fighting chance.

"I have to hand it to you, burying the Nihil-Gun here. It was the last place I'd think to look, to be honest. Barren, lifeless, ravaged by the elements. This is how Earth will look when I'm done with it."

"Yeah. I know." I say, spitting a mouthful of teeth. "Earth isn't going to be your first."

"Don't be a fool, Invictus. Disaster on this scale has never been performed before. Earth will be my own little masterpiece, my monument to your destruction. All the other planets, they were just shoddy little disasters, destroyed for the sake of expediency, but with your world, oh I'm going to take my time with it."

"Like you did here, on Venus." I let it sink in. "You killed Venus too, same way you're killing Earth."

"Ridiculous. I had never hurt a living soul before you drove me mad. I had never once taken a life, before you broke my mind!"

"But you have. You've crashed its tectonic plates together, boiled its oceans, destroyed its atmosphere, and let it burn for ten thousand years. You can do all this because you've done them before, here. On Venus."

The Moondragon started walking toward me. I kept stumbling back, trying to keep him from closing the distance.

"Why do you think I hid the Nihil-Gun here? You'd have found it anywhere else! I could have placed it in a black hole's event horizon and still you would have noticed it! I could have buried it in the center of the Great Red Storm at the other side of the universe and you still would have pinpointed its location. So why did I pick Venus, this planet right under your nose? Because I knew that this is the one place where you would never dare look. Because you burned this planet, thousands of years ago, same as you're going to do with the Earth!"

The Moondragon stopped dead in his tracks. I kept stumbling back, trying to widen the gap between us. Like a proper ex-villain, I kept talking:

"I found out by accident, back in the 60's. You had beaten me when I had teamed up with the Nervermore. Hunted me all the way around the solar system, so I tried to hide here, near Venus, hoping that you'd lose me in the clouds. Saw you swerve around the planet, not even sparing a look at it. So I looked around, tried to find out why you would do that. I was naïve back then and thought that maybe something in the planet's composition might be harmful to you. Rocks, say, or gasses. What I found instead was ruins. Ruins of cities that had been buried here for a very long time. Cities that housed technologies like the ones in your Orbital Palace. With statues of people that looked very much like you, and I found libraries. Tomes upon tomes of history, science, art. Took me a while to interpret them; had to fly all the way to the Medusa Nebula, just so I could find someone who even spoke a lick of Venusian. They told me things. They told me about your people and their little empire across the Galaxy. They told me how they had lost everything they had built for millennia in a single century, when their slaves rose collectively against them."

"And they told me about the champion they had engineered, the first of a legion that would retake the Galaxy in their name, but that champion was unstable, wasn't he?"

"Shut up."

"Something in his chemical make-up was causing a slight deformity in his higher cognitive centers. It was tiny, nearly insignificant. The Venusian elite hardly even noticed the little black spot in the champion's brain, distorting his neurons' chemical composition. They considered it just some error in the readings, and they let him loose."

"Be quiet." The Moondragon says and he's upon me the next second. I keep talking.

"He messes up his first test. They call him a failure, a waste of resources. They decide to scrap him, but at this point, the little black spot in his brain has grown. The Venusian champion's mind is unwell. His centers of cognitive thought have deteriorated. He is unstable. They try to rush things, so they manufactured an atom smasher to destroy him before he can mount a defense. They set up a ruse, disguising his execution as another test.

"But the champion sees through it. He moves faster than they can imagine, disables the atom smasher and kills them one by one. He's gotten hold of his powers by now, understood how they work, and prepared. It's all in his diary, the one he thought he'd buried inside two miles of plasteel.

"But the killing takes too long. The military fights him back, hard. So, the champion crushes the world with his bare hands and destroys every living thing. He snaps out of his rage by the time it's all over and sees the mountains of the dead, so he decides to dispose of the evidence. He obliterates the magnetosphere and lets the cosmos take care of the rest. Then he disappears. Maybe he flies away, into uncharted territories. Maybe he seeks refuge among the Legions of the Lost. Or maybe, just maybe, he digs himself a nice big hole in the sand and buries himself and cries like a baby until he's convinced himself that none of this took place, pushing the memories so deep in his subconscious that he thinks they never happened and spends the rest of his life trying to make amends. Until a fluke in his brain keeps him awake in stasis for two centuries and it happens all over again."

He's broken my arm in three places the second I'm done talking. His knee turns three of my ribs into powder, even as I'm struggling to stay conscious. He crushes my head against the sands with the heel of his boot, grinding it through solid rock.

There's a whistling in my ears and the sound of one heart stopping. Back home, the death toll's reached a billion.

"When I'm done with Earth, I'm going to scour this planet and burn it all over again, finish the job, but first, I'm going to kill you here, right at the eve of your little triumph. You don't have a chance against me. You don't have the Nihil-Gun. Pretty soon, you won't even have a footnote in cosmic history."

But I'll always have the Venusian atom smasher, I think and manage a split-lip smile as I look at the Moondragon's great idiot face, right before I strike the ground with my fist, causing a burst of kinetic energy that would activate the weapon. There's a hum like sutras sung from the bowels of the planet and something rises from the sand, shaking the dust of millennia off it.

A great ring, six miles across, starts to shudder and thrum, building up the energy required to unravel the Moondragon's atoms. The Venusian champion screams at the sound of the weapon made to kill him and tries to fly away. I grab him by the ankle and throw him on the ground, pinning him.

"You'll die too!" he screams.

"I know!" I tell him and he stops struggling.

Then the light tears us into pieces.

The first rule of being a supervillain is this: always have an escape route.

Alexander Vadus had told me that, back when we had teamed together to fight the Moondragon in the 70's. He'd been fighting Earth's Greatest Defender for twenty years already and had mastered the art of having a backup plan.

As we sat in his fortress inside the Marianas Trench, away from prying eyes, Alexander Vadus had confided in me how much he feared death. He told me that old age was catching up with him and that his longevity serum wasn't working all that well anymore. He was nearly 200 years old and had recently discovered he had Alzheimer's.

The thought of a mind like his rotting away just about broke my heart.

He'd planned ahead, of course. Developed his Samsara Technology in the 60's, with the intent of flash-cloning himself in the event of his death, allowing him to continue his work even in the event of his demise, but this was different: his brain was dying. His DNA samples, the ones that would restore him to life upon perishing, would be unable to stop the progress of the disease.

Even if Alexander Vadus was reborn seconds after death inside a perfectly healthy 25-year old body, his brain would still be crippled. So he trusted me with it, his greatest, most powerful ally, who he considered to be too dumb to understand and replicate the process.

We had our drinks, said our goodbyes and then Alexander Vadus strapped on his Titano Warsuit and then went against the entire Sentinels Team, who ripped it to pieces. He detonated the hydrogen bomb in the lead-lined compartment beneath his seat just as they were about to put the cuffs on him, reducing Millenium City to molten slag.

We got together to mourn him, the supervillains. There was the Mind, who had decided to come from hiding in China and do one last job for the sake of his oldest and closest friend. The Lady, the scariest, most intelligent and captivating woman I had met. She tried to get into my pants in exchange for access to the fortress. The Anti-Messiah was at the funeral as well. I kept feeling his mind trying to reach mine, to glean the secrets of Samsara technology. Thankfully, I had inoculated myself with Alexander's Tabula Rasa vaccine, rendering me immune to mental probing, and about as conversant as a pile of cabbages for 24 hours.

So, I went back and worked on Alexander's device. The disaster of Millenium City had made the heroes much more wary, much more violent. It was only natural that I would be fearing for my life. Thankfully, the Venusian manuscripts helped. They contained extensive reports on the function of what they called Q-Comms, instantaneous transmission of information through thought.

They also contained the blueprints for a very basic identity-bank.

I was expelled from the cloning vats, screaming. It took my mind a few seconds to realize that I was no longer being atomized. The Marianas Trench fortress was collapsing around me, sinking inside a rift of superheated air bursting from the ocean floor.

With a thought, I rearranged my cellular structure to grow myself a new suit to alleviate my nakedness and burst out of the fortress, rising to the sky to survey the damage. The world was burning, but it was nothing I couldn't handle. Without a second thought, I flew back to the ground and began the long process of restoring the continents to their original place.

I had the tectonic plates mended by 6 P.M., eastern seaboard time.

I was halfway through breaking up a tsunami a few miles out of Yokohama, when I stole a glance back, just for a moment and I saw him: the Moondragon, lit up like an exploding star, slowly taken apart by an ancient Venusian weapon on the surface of his home planet, dying slowly, torn apart in layers.

With a smile of contentment, I threw myself back to work.

THE END

Bio: Mr. Paradias is a writer by choice. His short stories have been published in the AE Canadian Science Fiction Review, The Curious Gallery Magazine, and The BATTLE ROYALE  Slambook by Haikasoru. His short story, "How You Ruined Everything" was included in Tangent Online's 2013 recommended SF reading list, and his short story "The Grim" has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

E-mail: Konstantine Paradias

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