“Mreow.” Katkat hopped onto an end table next to the Danger: Couch. The Danger: Danger Phone rang as if in response to the feline’s presence. He sniffed it.
It rang.
He gave it curious looks from slightly different angles.
It rang.
He tapped it cautiously with his paw.
It rang.
He rubbed the side of his face on it, leaning until he collapsed and the phone became his pillow.
It rang.
“Hm,” Nuklear Man said. “I still hear the phone ringin’. I don’t think you quite know what you’re doing. I’d offer my help or at least glance in your direction, but I’m a little busy single-handedly destroying the entire Gorthzok Armada at the moment.” The Bullet destroyed him. “Er, but as luck would have it, I happen to be available now.” He looked over. “Aw geez. That’s not how you answer a phone.”
“Mew,” Katkat snuggled against it.
“Curse you and your infallible logic!”
Katkat purred.
“You don’t have to rub it in,” Nuklear Man moped.
The phone still rang.
“You win this round, Mr. Kitty. But for now, let’s shut this thing up.” He picked up the receiver and promptly dropped it right back. “Oh yeah, that’s the stuff.” He turned and took all of two steps when the phone began to ring anew. His entire body cringed. The second ring didn’t even have time to complete itself before he picked up and yelled, “This line is reserved for emergencies and only Dr. Genius has the number so quit callin’ me!” he slammed the receiver this time.
And again, it rang.
And again, he picked it up. “
Grah!
Look, buddy. You’ve got a lot of nerve callin’ here. The city could be in terrible,
terrible
peril, but I’d never know because Dr. Genius can’t call me to action because you keep tying up the phone line!”
“Nuklear Man, it is me, Dr. Genius,” she managed to say before the Hero got the chance to hang up.
He paused. “Prove it.”
Her eyes closed, she shook her head. “We have this same conversation every time I try to contact you via the Danger Phone.”
“Hm,” he responded. “I’ll have to take your word on that. What’cha need, Doc?”
“There’s an emergency downtown.”
“And you need a little of the ol’ Nukie Magic Plazma Goodness to make it all right, hm?”
“Something like that. There are five villains causing general mayhem where you last battled Superion. I don’t want you to engage in battle with them, not initially at any rate. I’ve got an Überdyne team down there so they’ll be able to keep an eye on you to see if I should send in reinforcements.”
“Heh, that’ll be a first.”
“When you get on the scene, your first concern will be for the innocent.”
“Heh, that’ll be a first.”
“Get any and all civilians out of the area before you do anything else. Understood?”
“Eh, more or less.”
“And Nuklear Man?”
“Yes?”
“These five, um, villains. They may claim to know something of your past.”
“Oh?”
“But don’t believe them. It’s part of their strategy.”
“Ah-ha. How sneaky of them, playing on my amnesia like that with their dirty, naughty little lies. It’s a good thing we’ve got you on our side, eh Doc?”
“Indeed.”
“Off I go to dispense some indiscriminate justice.” He put down the Danger: Danger Phone and
wooooosh
ed through the Danger: Main Doors a millisecond after they had opened just wide enough to admit him passage.
__________
Dr. Menace was perched on the roof of one of the taller abandoned warehouses. Even though she was perhaps two blocks from her target, she kept low and made certain to keep some kind of cover between herself and the subject. Thanks to her Evil: Nega-oculars, she was able to observe him in great detail even at her current distance and with a few abandoned warehouses blocking off her line of sight.
“Evil: Log. 9:51 A.M.
“Looking at him now I cannot help but be reminded of Nuklear Man. It muzt be the cape and that N on hiz chezt. What hiz intentionz here could be are outzide my ability to zurmize. For now. There iz zomething, zomething divine, no, regal in hiz body language. Yet here he iz, walking among the fallen and forgotten huzkz of warehouzez inztead of ruling on high from zome caztle. Why?”
He turned in her direction and she instinctively ducked behind a nearby refrigeration unit of some kind even though she knew he couldn’t possibly see her.
“Azzuming of courze that hiz senzes rezemble our own,” she told herself. “And why shouldn’t they? He bearz the mark of Nuklear Man, which iz clearly the English letter N, hiz craft iz exactly one mile in diameter according to Überdyne’z surveillance, and he appearz to be a perfect human specimen.”
She brought the Evil: Nega-oculars to her eyes and spied on him once more. The alien watched a plastic bag dance in the wind for several seconds. It reminded Dr. Menace of a rowboat being tossed by the anger of a stormy sea. The bag latched on to Nihel’s leg. He regarded it with an inquisitive smile, bent over slightly to get a better look, but didn’t seem to have the slightest inclination of removing it.
“What a strange dichotomy,” she whispered to herself. “Perhapz,” she told herself. “Yez, perhapz a face to face meeting iz what iz needed. He seemz harmlezz enough, not that it matterz. I could eazily wrap myzelf in a Negaflux shield, or better yet, if I can get him back to my lab, capture him in a Negaflux field if he stepz out of line. There would be no ezcape.” She thought a moment longer. “In fact, such a tactic may prove quite uzeful in any caze. He no doubt holdz the anzwers to many scientific quandriez and would conzider a lifetime imprizoned on thiz rock too horrible not to releaze more than a few of them.”
__________
Nuklear Man soared over his beloved city of Metroville. From his aerial view, the cityscape was pockmarked with as-of-yet repaired craters for which he personally was directly or indirectly responsible. He swelled with pride. “Ah, memories,” his voice was a song of accomplishment.
But his stroll down memory lane came to a crashing halt as the Golden Guardian’s Nuklear Senses detected trouble afoot. “Ah-ha,” he self-narrated. “I do believe I have found the very source of our fair city’s problem.”
Below him, the five aliens wreaked havoc. “Well, that’s one problem solved,” he told himself as he rocketed past without slowing down. “Wonder what’s on the ol’ Danger: TV now. I’ve been out for, I don’t know, minutes.”
He leaned into a U-turn and cut a golden parabola through the morning sky when an errant blast of electricity splashed against his face. “Ouch!” he yelled and stumbled to a mid-air stop. “Who did that?!” he demanded of the heavens. He gave a particular cloud a nasty look. “It was you, wasn’t it. You can’t fool me. You’re in cahoots with Sparky, aren’t you! That’s just like you sky-father god archetypes, gangin’ up on me like that. You should be ashamed. But, more to the point, you should be evaporated. As such,” he said, gathering up energy in his hands. “PLAZMAAA—”Another electrical blast zapped him, this time in the back. He spun around to face the increasingly scarred city, “—BEAM!” and a beam of fussion-ish energy added yet another scar.
__________
Safriel yelped in surprise and dropped the car she had planned to hurl through an office building. A new smoking crater smoked itself mere inches from where she stood. “Hey, watch where you’re shootin’, Gadriel!” she scolded. “You nearly took my tush off with that last one. Do you have any idea how long it took Lord Nihel to get it just right?”
Gadriel turned to her, though it was difficult to tell that he had done so since his body was currently living electricity in a vaguely humanoid shape. “What’re you talking about?” he asked with sparks of annoyance flying from his white-hot body. “I’ve been shooting out windows with my Electroblasts.”
“You’ve got some pretty lousy aim, champ,” she retorted while pointing to the smoking crater that lay between them.
“Oh yeah?” Gadriel got right in her face, “You wanna see just how bad my aim is?”
“I already have. Besides, you can hit me all day long. I can just Protonically alter my molecular make up to harmlessly conduct electricity.”
“Cease!” Variel thundered with his unvoice.
“Look, you made him yell,” Safriel said.
“She started it!” Gadriel defended.
Variel gave each of them long stares. Of course, the slightest glance of those blank silver non-eyes would probably be too much for most souls to withstand for long, so the actual duration of these stares is quite subjective. “Cease this petty argument. Recommence your duties.”
“I don’t see why we have to do all the dirty work,” Gadriel complained.
The immense black whole of Variel rumbled with a nongrowl. “My will is second only to Lord Nihel’s. You will no more question me than you would he. Complete your given task!”
“Arel’s pretty powerful,” Safriel said. “He probably doesn’t come out for small stuff like this. Bring in the big guns over there.” She pointed to Dakael and Kadael.
Gadriel looked at the diminutive Dakael. “Well, the big
gun
at any rate.”
Dakael quaked and a half dozen copies of himself
bamf
ed into existence around him. “We’ll show you big guns,” they said in unison while each one made a different rude gesture, many of which were completely unknown to the citizens of Earth.
“Kadael!” Variel nonbarked. “Control your counterpart.”
The mountainous Kadael reached down to several of the clones. They disappeared once he touched them and the giant seemed to expand slightly as a result. Dakael dispersed the others until only his original self remained.
“As for you, Safriel,” Variel began . He was cut short, however.
“Ha-ho!” Nuklear Man crashed in on them. When the dust cleared, he was knee deep in Metroville asphalt. “Oh, shucks.” He stepped out of his tiny crater. “That happens every time I land. I swear, someone shoulda built this planet out of sterner stuff because I could probably tear it to tiny little bits and then blast those bits into smaller bits which would then be subject to further blasts, thus pulverizing these already small bits into progressively smaller and smaller bits until…”
The five were awe-struck. They gathered around him, suffocatingly close, their movements slow, reverent. Even Variel’s cold eyes seemed to hold a sparkle of emotion, something between worship and love.
The Hero was too busy prattling to notice, “…and then Vishnu would be all like ‘Desist your universe tromping ways,’ and then I’d be all, ‘You think you’re all that, but you are
not
all that,’ and then—”
“Arel,” Variel unwhispered.
“—I’d grab that multi-armed freak—”
His name shall be Arel, the true name of fire.
His power will know not limits
For the flame is unpredictable;
A god without destiny written
Will be the father’s sword against Fate eternal.
“Er,” Nuklear Man shook his head and wobbled for a second. “Whoa, that was trippy. Woo!” He put one hand on Kadael’s huge shoulder to support himself. “Hey!” the Hero pointed at Kadael’s outfit, specifically the Nuklear N displayed on the chest. “I’ve got one of those. Hey,
all
of you have one. Well, except for you, Gruesome,” he said, pointing to Variel. The mammoth mass of blackness moved slightly and Nuklear Man could barely make out the N on his chest as an area slightly less black than the rest. “Ah, well there we are. You guys must be fans, huh?”
They looked at one another with quizzical glances.
“Yeah,” Nuklear Man said, releasing Kadael’s shoulder. “I can’t blame ya, personally. I
am
pretty cool, ya know.”
“Arel,” Variel said again.
“Hey, who’s this Arel guy everyone keeps talkin’ about?” the Hero asked. “He sounds neato.”
__________
“Ima,” Nameless Technician whispered through the Watchtower’s Scientific: Communications Panel.
“You don’t have to whisper, Nameless,” she answered.
“It can’t hurt. I’m with the team.”
“What! I told you to get a team down there so that
you
could stay at Überdyne and be safe. You’re not expendable.”
“Just following your example, Doctor. What’s a little personal risk in the face of possible enlightenment?”
“I don’t approve, but there’s nothing I can do about it from up here. Report.”
“Nuklear Man is talking with the aliens.”
“How’s he reacting?”
“Fine. Almost, I don’t know. Friendly. But there’s something you should see. I'll patch you in to our video surveillance.” He pushed a few buttons and another screen on the Scientific: Communications Panel lit up. It was live feed showing Nuklear Man surrounded by the five aliens as they conversed. It seemed to Ima that Nuklear Man was doing an unusual amount of listening.
“They look so, so
human,”
she said to herself. “Well, other than the one with silver eyes.” She squint her own. “He’s a bit hard to make out, exactly. Anyway, what am I looking for here, specifically?”
“You’ll see. Wait until the girl moves out of the way.”
And then by shifting her weight, she did.
“They each wear the N,” Ima said aloud.
__________
Dr. Menace stood in the middle of one intersection while watching her subject stroll along the filthy street that led directly to her. Her finger wasn’t more than a twitch away from the Negaflux Shield’s activation button.
He looked her straight in the eyes the whole time he approached her. His gaze was dreadful, not from any impending malice, but rather the sense of import he carried. His eyes spoke of the beauty of destruction, yet also whispered of the horror of life. And with one last step, he was before her. Not too far and not too close. He spoke, “Greetings Earthim woman,” his voice was a perfect compliment to the eyes.
And somehow, she knew that they were more similar than not. “And to you, ah, excuze me, but I haven’t a clue how to addrezz you.”
“Yes,” he almost laughed. “I would seem to have you at a bit of a disadvantage. I am known as Nihel,” he said with a hand against his chest and a slight bow.