The Moderator Saga Epilogue, Part 1: How to Disappear Completely

“I’m fine,” insisted Dreamcatcher Kokopelli Foxglove, as he reclined in his lounging lawn chair on the roof of the Lair Legion mansion, facing west toward the city of Parodiopolis as the sun set on the skyline.

“Your wife is right,” decided Jay Boaz, reflecting on the fact that Radiohead’s Kid A was playing on his best friend’s portable stereo. “You’re a terrible liar.”

“Fuck you,” Dream responded reflexively, not bothering to look up from the squirming, slumbering infant daughter he cradled in his left arm. “I’m an exceptional liar.”

“That’s not exactly the best approach to convince me of the truth of what you’re saying,” Jay pointed out pedantically.

“I’m fine,” Dream repeated. “Alternate timeline. Retconned reality. Imaginary story.”

Jay winced. “The Moderator’s SPAM Agents –”

“I didn’t do it,” Dream cut him off. “Not anymore. Called Drury, to check on his SPUD Agents. The timing of my call caught his attention, since a few dozen of his people had all just suffered seizures at the same time.”

“What happened?” Jay wasn’t sure he wanted to know, but he needed to know.

“Cross-dimensional consciousness feedback,” Dream recited the diagnosis. “That’s what Al said, anyway. If you … die in an alternate timeline, one that results from a retcon, then once the preexisting reality is restored … well, basically, it can fuck with your head. Something about the interruption of synaptic functions … I don’t know,” Dream waved off the complexities. “Bottom line, they’ve all since recovered. Some of them might remember what happened with the Moderator, and some of them might not.”

“But they’re all alive,” Jay sought to confirm. “All of the Moderator’s SPAM Agents, that you –”

“No,” Dream conceded curtly. “Between a third to a half of them are still dead.”

Jay blinked. “But you said –”

“I didn’t do it,” Dream chuckled bitterly. “It’s easy for those of us with Character Shields to forget, but if you’re something like a SPUD Agent, you can’t always count on a return trip. I went through Drury’s database, with my photographic memory, and I picked out the pictures of all the folks I remembered, from what happened with the Moderator. Some of them were sent off to places like Badripoor and Sybia, and never came home, but most of them bought it during the Parody War.” Dream burst into a brief fit of barking laughter, the suddenness of which unsettled Jay. “That’s one hell of a clever way to keep your army fat, when you think about it. Because of the divergence points in the history that the Hood dropped him into, the Moderator was able to recruit from the ranks of our dead.”

“They weren’t the only ones who died over there,” Jay reminded Dream, forcing himself to confront the source of their shared anxieties. “We still don’t know what’s happened to Epitome –”

“Goddammit, I didn’t do it,” Dream shook his head impatiently. “I mean, come on! You’re supposed to be the sensible one, so you tell me … what are the odds that this is somehow my fault, when everybody, and I mean everybody else, manages to make the jump back – and hell, we even gain a few on the ride back – all except for one? No, I call bullshit.” Dream set his jaw in fierce frustration. “We’re going to find him, and he’s going to be fine, and it’s going to be something completely unrelated to all of this, and I’m going to kick his ass for putting me through this.” Dream glanced down and saw that his drowsy daughter had woken up, and was staring up at him with wide eyes. “Imaginary story,” he whispered soothingly to her, stroking her face with the fingers of his right hand. “Nothing’s changed.”

“I can think of at least one thing that has,” Jay challenged, gesturing toward Dream’s right arm.

Dream followed Jay’s gaze, then stifled a snort. “Think you mean the other one,” Dream waggled the fingers of his right hand, then balled it up into a fist, and rapped his knuckles on the bicep of his left arm, producing a muted, but still distinctly metallic, knocking noise.

Jay squinted. “With your Silly Suit on –”

“Yeah, you can’t even tell,” Dream smiled.

“Still,” Jay crossed his arms over his chest, “my point stands.”

Dream’s shoulders slumped. “The reason I kept my Android Arm –”

“Wait,” Jay interrupted. “Your ‘Android Arm?’”

“Yeah?” Dream was curious of Jay’s curiosity.

“You’ve … named it?” Jay suppressed a smirk.

“I name everything,” Dream shrugged matter-of-factly. “Me and Batman. Anyway, the reason I kept my Android Arm is because it’s made out of Imaginesium, which is another form of Impossibilitium, and past a certain point, it’s … heh, well, it’s pretty much impossible to retcon Impossibilitium. That’s why the Moderator had to keep me around, and keep me pacified, rather than just deleting me. And since the rest of my body is made out of Impossibilitium, I would have remained minus the arm I lost in the Moderator’s retconned reality, fighting the Dominator, even after our reality was retconned back.” Dream cocked his head to one side, as an errant thought occurred to him. “I guess I could have grown it back, though, given enough time and energy –”

“You crossed a line back there,” Jay declared, no longer content to be sidetracked by Dream’s stream-of-consciousness distractions.

“Really? Thanks for the tip,” Dream shot back acidly, his face hardening into a scowl. “Wouldn’t have figured that one out on my own. Good thing for me, though, that everyone else seems to know how I should feel, about events that happened to me and not them. According to my mom, I don’t have the right to feel guilty about doing ‘the right thing,’ because if it had been her who’d watched me get killed, she wouldn’t have let anyone leave there alive, regardless of whether they surrendered or not. As for my sister, she thinks I’m ‘lame’ for not feeling proud of doing what I did, since she would have killed everyone there as preemptive retaliation, just for making the threat.”

“And April?” Jay checked, hoping that Dream had received a dissenting perspective from her, and grasping, perhaps for the first time, the breadth of the schism that separated the morals that Dream had chosen to uphold as a superhero from the sense of ethics that his family and upbringing had instilled in him.

“She and Bettie both pegged me with PTSD,” Dream rolled his eyes. “Bettie didn’t know it by that term, of course, but her dad sure as hell had it, from the symptoms she spotted when she was growing up - I’d never even heard of the Boer War before, but it sounds like it was pretty brutal - whereas April is familiar with it on an even more personal level, thanks to her years as the Groovy Gecko-Gal.”

Jay finally took the open seat next to Dream’s. “So, those are their opinions,” Jay hunched forward in the folding patio chair, leaning in to rub the peach fuzz on top of Iris Paintbrush Sunrise’s head, as he addressed her father. “So, what are yours? Because if you try and claim that you don’t have an opinion on this, I’ll know that you’re lying, since there’s never been anything that you didn’t have an opinion on in your life.”

Dream grinned ruefully, and sighed wearily, before he offered his answer.

...looking at the title after reading that last line, I mean. I hope I'm wrong about that.

Or maybe a course, like you get sentenced to in traffic court, where she explains why superheroes shouldn't snap and murder hundreds of law enforcement officers. There'd probably be grim titled filmstrips ("Blood on the Spandex!") to go along with it and everything, followed by a written exam.

In any event, and interesting beginning to the fallout of Dreams alternate actions. I'm curious as to how this will affect him in the long run, and what his immediate response will be (way to leave us hanging there, by the way...)

Bring on the next part!