It took an escaped, egomaniacal toucan to make Kirk Soren realize that he was drowning in a colorless universe. The incident had taken place at a gas station in the suburbs ringing Oklahoma City. He’d been sweltering in the thick summer air, apathetically guarding his “luxury car” while he filled it up, writhing in a three-piece prison uniform. (He only wore it to and from work; once there, he donned a masculinity-threatening lab jumper.) Insanely hot girls in their teens and twenties were bouncing around wearing next to nothing, sweat dribbling down their tanktops, smooching unshaven guys that looked like they’d just woken up in an alley. Kirk didn’t bother standing in the shade. The sun wasn’t an issue for him, as he’d numbed himself to just about everything, experiencing reality through a dull filter. His day had been full of clipped corporate verbiage and fluorescent lighting. He was making huge life decisions (what he’d warm up for dinner, what he’d watch on TV) when there was a commotion.

Everyone was pointing at a pastel-spectrum toucan, which had somehow gotten a frayed dishtowel snagged around its neck, making it look like a cape. The thing was strutting, practically dancing on one of those pickups with hugely oversized tires. A toothpick-thin Asian-American girl, no older than twelve, seemed to be hypnotized by it. She shouldered a boombox that was almost as big as she was, and from it came an upbeat, infectious song, which Kirk would later identify as Groove Armada’s “My Friend”. Some overtly Aryan guy in a wifebeater tried to scare the bird away, but it lunged at him and pecked him on the forehead. An improbably-comedic chase sequence then ensued. Between the moonwalking bird, the music, and, yes, the blood, it was incredibly surreal. And Kirk had laughed. For the first time in ages, he laughed. He’d literally doubled over, laughing so painfully that he felt like he was giving birth to something, like spring was exploding in his chest. The universe suddenly tilted, smacking him in the forehead with the ground.

He woke up in a painfully-sterile hospital room, a white and silver world unto itself. The ugliest doctor he’d ever seen was babbling about heat-stroke and “overly-exciting stimuli”. Though the doctor said he was already doing better, Kirk could feel stress creeping back into him, his muscles taking on their old metal rigidness…and then he saw the paint. All the colors of the rainbow. Behind the stack of cans was a sign leaning against the wall: “Coming Soon - The Edna J. Thomas Pediatric Wing”. The room was incredibly dull, and the dullness felt like it was closing in on him. Kirk abruptly sat up in bed and grabbed a pen out of the doctor’s shirt pocket.

An hour later, with everyone thinking the doctor had gone home early for the night, a nurse went in to check on their heat victim, who wasn’t a particularly high priority. The light was off in his room. She flicked the switch, nearly passing out in the process. The doctor’s corpse was on the floor, its parts creatively rearranged, but the walls, floor and ceiling were the real attention-grabber. It looked like a demented child had finger-painted them. There were streaks and spirals, explosions of exotic color-combinations. The tableau resembled an undiscovered galaxy, only instead of being set against blackness, it was backlit by a warm red. Except the red paint had never been opened. At the center of it all was Kirk Soren himself, naked, psychadelically covered in paint and other substances.

He pointed a crimson-caked scalpel at the nurse and said, “No more Cream of Wheat. No more vanilla ice cream. No more Wheat Thins. I found my calling--I’m an artist.”

---------

Sam D’Antonati had been terrified for his life. He’d had his will updated, purchased several crates of black-market weapons, and used a third party to rent a remote cabin in Colorado. A friend of his had recommended a cyborg enforcer/bodyguard out of Parodiopolis; he’d seriously considered selling his stake in a major southern hemisphere farm to hire him for an entire month. That was a week ago. Today, he was following his usual routine in Philadelphia, hanging out with the boys in an illegal second-story casino (officially, it was an extremely obscure and exclusive restaurant), which was above a bakery and below unrented apartments that they used for “storage”. They were relaxing, killing time. It seemed like a joke, now, and it was all because some idiot got one word wrong.

The casino was a small-scale version of an old gentleman’s club. Wood paneling, a dark, muted shade of green on the gaming tables and floor, bronze chandeliers that looked like upside-down spiders. There was a huge oak bar and a healthy batch of leather furniture. The lighting was soft, the atmosphere rich and understated. At night, the place was jam-packed, but during the day, it served as a hangout for D’Antonati’s crew. They were all there, waiting for the maniac to show up.

Put simply, Sam D’Antonati was old-school, which was both good and bad. He was as honest and straightforward a mobster as you’d find, but there were some cultural eccentricities that went along with him. What had gotten him in trouble most recently was the fact that he was religious about his reputation. Someone within their organization had been spreading stories about him…they were true, but they didn’t make him look good. He’d dealt with it. But this individual had been a top earner, and he’d provided specialized services that weren’t easily replaced. D’Antonati had been made decades ago, he’d paid his dues; he wasn’t worried. And then some kid off the street told him he heard that the Crying Clown was after him.

The Crying Clown, of course, was the bane of the Dark Knight’s existence. Supposedly dead, not that that meant anything. He was a tear-track-tattooed psychopath who’d racked up a body-count in the thousands. D’Antonati had nearly had a heart attack when the kid told him, and he’d gotten ready to run for his life. But, right before he cut his losses and took off, the miscommunication had been cleared up. It was the Crime Clown that had been hired to take him out. Just some random, copycat loser. The only time he got attention was when a newspaper made a typo. So, instead of going to great lengths, D’Antonati decided to just round up his crew and wait for the little queer to come to them.

Around noon on their fifth day of waiting, the elevator dinged.

D’Antonati took out a silencer-fitted pistol. The sixty-something man was unhealthily tan, silver-haired, and dressed in a grey and black silk suit. “Remember, these freaks like to hide up high. If it looks empty, just got himself braced.”

Seven armed men aimed at the elevator. Suddenly, the stupid old disco ball descended from the ceiling and came alive. It had been part of the place’s short-lived “modernizing” in the ‘70s, and now, they only turned it on for Halloween, or maybe when they brought in strippers.

The elevator dinged again.

Its doors slid open, revealing that it was jam-packed with balloon animals, done in many different colors. They floated out of it. Some were obvious enough (dogs, fish), while others had seemingly come from a toddler’s overactive imagination. Though there was no logical reason to, the crew backed away from them as they fanned out. As soon as they did, though, they felt stupid, and they started batting the balloons around.

“…what, is this it?”

“Hey, guys, check this out. I’m gonna whack Finding Nemo here.” Jimmy, the youngest of D’Antonati’s crew, walked up to a balloon and pulled the trigger.

He laughed, they laughed, and then he started coughing up blood. There had been a very fine mist in the balloon, which was now dissipating around Jimmy’s collapsing body. Everyone held their breath and ran away from him as quickly as they could, flattening themselves against the walls, allowing the dozens of balloons to take over the room. Blood poured out of every orifice Jimmy had. D’Antonati ran to a row of switches on the wall and put the ceiling fans on reverse, hoping to draw the gas to the ceiling and maybe get the balloons out of the way. The gas didn’t spread (it had been one of the smaller animals), but the balloons merely orbited the room, going counterclockwise against the disco lights.

Someone was standing in the rear of the elevator. He casually left it and walked amongst the balloons, bumping them here and there. “You won’t want to be using those guns, anymore, gentlemen.” His voice was impossibly high and breathy, reverberating like an opera tenor.

The Crime Clown’s favorite color was clearly red. He wore a crimson, white-pinstriped suit with a crimson tie and a black button-down shirt. His hair was crimson, as were his spats and sharpened fingernails. As they’d expected, his skin was a chalkish white, and his face was long and thin, but there was more to him than that. His jaw and mouth looked unrealistically large, like he’d been surgically altered. His smile was metal; it reflected things as a funhouse mirror would, warping and distorting. And at first, D’Antonati thought it was a trick of the disco lights, but the Crime Clown’s alabaster skin was covered in ever-changing colorful designs. Sometimes they were symmetrical, sometimes not. It was like looking at kaleidoscopic tattoos. D’Antonati had heard about cellular dyes, but he’d never seen anything like this.

The balloon-animals were swirling around the room--but even if they’d been unmoving, D’Antonati’s crew still couldn’t have gotten a clear shot. They gripped their guns by the barrels and advanced on him, hesitantly pushing dolphins and dinosaurs aside.

“Look out, I’m armed!” The Crime Clown was swinging a rubber chicken in each hand. Someone walked up to the freak (between the balloons and the strobing lighting, it was impossible to see who), and D’Antonati heard bones cracking. Nothing unusual about that, until he realized it was his own people that were screaming. The rubber chickens had metal cores, he was using them as nunchuks, and his men were going down like they’d been hit with sledgehammers. The Crime Clown floored two of them, but one managed to stay on his feet, lunging and trying to tackle him. Suddenly, the top half of the clown’s head snapped back--his jaw was double-hinged, and multiple rows of metal teeth sank down on juicy tendon between the man’s neck and shoulder. Blood spurted everywhere.

Only two of his crew were left, and they were approaching him from opposite sides. The Crime Clown pocketed his chickens and took out a small yellow balloon (complete with three black markings that comprised a smiley face). Thinking it was another bio-weapon, they stopped in their tracks. But it was actually a remoldable polymer, and he squeezed and stretched it into the shape of a long-handled hatchet. With one swing, he created a liquid arc, and only D’Antonati was left.

Predictably, he ran for the stairwell. The door blew off right before he reached it--the impact nearly bowled him over. The Crime Clown was shaking what looked like a rectangular box of candy, the kind available at any movie theater, and he aimed it at D’Antonati’s feet, firing off another round. The edible-looking blue projectile made a bowling-ball-sized hole in the floor.

D’Antonati slumped against the wall, sliding to a sitting position. He was sobbing. “Oh, god, please. Whatever they’re paying you, I’ll double it!”

The Crime Clown backhanded him. “Don’t insult me. This isn’t about money, it’s about art.”

“Wh--what?” He barely managed to vomit out the word. Then, he started mumbling to himself in a detached tone. “Of course. I hate my life. God, I hate it. Of course he’d send a lunatic, instead of somebody I coul--”

Suddenly, the Crime Clown grabbed him by the lapels and lifted him off the floor. “I. AM. NOT. CRAZY.”

He dropped him on his butt, straightened his own lapels, and snapped his fingers. A group of elderly nuns walked in. They were staggering, drooling, and holding things that D’Antonati couldn’t quite see through his tear-blurred vision.

“…what is this?”

“It’s your fifteen minutes.”

As they got closer, he could tell that the nuns had been drugged. Their eyes were red, their expressions twisted. And then he saw what they were holding.

“Now, I don’t believe in meaningless violence. I’m all about purpose and irony. You’re a respectable man, you care about your reputation…so I’ve come up with something special for you.”

The nuns were wielding multiple-pronged, painful-looking sex toys. A red light was blinking up on the ceiling.

“They’ll probably kill you while they’re fighting over you, but it’ll be a few minutes before that happens. And that’s when you’ll earn your claim to fame. This video will spread like wildfire…viral, all that stuff.”

D’Antonati thought about his still-living mother turning on the evening news and screamed.

---------

They wouldn’t show the whole thing on TV, of course. But they showed enough to make clear what happened. Later, armed with a holographic disguise that a friend of his had made (the clown was great with chemicals and okay with engineering, but other fields were beyond him), he watched a group of people watching it in an airport bar. Horrifically normal lives were gifted with brief absurdity: a mobster, balloon-animals, disco lights, nympho-nuns. He’d brightened up their day a little.

His cell rang, and he used a fake-normal voice to answer it. “Yeah?”

“It’s Sheila, buddy. I’ve got a gig for you.”

“Please tell me it’s somewhere with a beach.”

“Technically, yes. Gothametropolis York.”

The Crime Clown cursed, retreating into an empty hallway that held restrooms and a water fountain. He spoke in a furious whisper. “No, no, no. I told you, I don’t work there, anymore. For all I know, my near-namesake will disembowel me as soon as I show up. And I’d rather not get thrown in front of another semi by that sociopathic vigilante.”

“Look, it’s a lot of money, and it’s just a scare-job. Plus, you’ve gotta consider--it’s a pretty depressing place. They need your work more than most.”

The clown tapped his chin thoughtfully, his lilt leaking through. “I suppose that’s true.”

Kirk Soren had never been able to get people to take him seriously. Everyone had always treated him like a joke, and he’d finally given in, deciding to be his kind of joke. He wasn’t an albino or an accident-victim, he was a self-made man. After making himself beautiful, he was doing the same to the world…


Final Strike
Last Place on Earth


Peter Kral was living every employee’s worst nightmare--he’d lost the ability to get himself fired.

In the late ‘90s, a coffeetable book was published on the subject of the GMY Plaza Hotel. The Plaza had been finished in 1881, and at the time, it held the honor of being the tallest building in the world. It was a grey-stone affair--from some angles, it looked almost like a castle, a gargoyle-skinned monolith. The book had been an oversized hardcover with fine production values, pushing five hundred pages. Four hundred and fifty of those pages covered the period from its opening until 1929. During that time, the Plaza had held many important guests, including a then-obscure Wilbur Parody; the Carmichaels, GMY’s legendary first family; several generations of colorful mobsters; the scientist that had created the Blue Wraith (an artificial, electromagnetic “ghost” that had been the main wonder at the 1893 World’s Fair, which had been in GMY); even the portly President Taft, who’d met with some boring British gentleman named “Mumph”. The next seven decades, however, were carefully glossed over, tacked on at the end. There simply hadn’t been any history made in those historical walls, since then. Peter, god help him, was unwillingly changing that.

“Ho, your press conference be startin’.”

Peter kicked his way out from under the covers, poking his head through like a turtle would. He was being spoken to by a fifteen-year-old white girl with purple hair. She was smoking a joint, watching commercials, and wearing a patriotic thong. The commercials abruptly ended. It was a newschannel, and it was showing a bunch of cameras aimed at an empty podium. That was two floors down.

Rolling out of bed, Peter sprinted to the bathroom for a five-minute shower. They were in the Presidential Suite, and it was nice enough, but the hotel overall? It felt like a musty old museum. That said, they’d added their own personal touches. Their room was covered in forty-ounce bottles, kleenex boxes, newspapers, and various types of guns. The view was incredible. It was safe to have the curtains open because the glass was bulletproof; a necessity for GMY hotel suites. Sirens, gunfire, and the occasional explosion could be heard outside. Several minutes after emerging from his shower, Peter was wearing a rumpled black suit and a red-and-blue-striped tie. He’d just turned fifty. Thanks to his job, his brown hair had started going grey long ago. As unlikely as it seemed, Peter Kral was the Director of the Gothametropolis York branch of the FBI. Obviously, no sane person wanted that job, but his various attempts at getting himself canned weren’t working.

The Plaza was serving as the GMY FBI’s temporary headquarters, thanks to what happened with…what was that pervert’s name? The pyro guy who got himself trapped in that prototypical hazmat suit. Suffice to say, he was on the “do not confront” list that wasn’t supposed to exist, but some idiots had gotten cocky and managed to get the drop on him. Which lasted all of the twenty minutes it took for him to be delivered to their old HQ. Then, he came to, burned the place down, and somebody (probably the newly-returned Dark Knight) had jumped him and beaten him within an inch of his life. So, they needed a new base of operations, and it wasn’t like tourists were flocking in, given what was going on. The Plaza was nearly bankrupt, anyway, they just unofficially repo’d the sucker.

Still in his socks, Peter ran out of the Presidential Suite and took off for the elevators. Black-armored, SWAT-looking guys stood guard at intervals, while FBI agents had hushed conversations on secure cell phones. As of a few weeks ago, the vast majority of the GMY FBI budget was going towards “private security companies”, which were being used to guard certain government buildings (the courthouse, the Mayor’s mansion, and now the Plaza) and other important sites (a few banks, power plants and water treatment facilities). In truth, none of his agents (nor he himself) had been paid in a while, not that they were complaining. They were all secretly or not-so-secretly working for someone else. The mobs, the corporations that were circling like vultures, the corrupt-as-ever GYPD (which had hunkered down to protect “strategic” neighborhoods, i.e., wealthy, usually white ones, like Lawton), even the rumored network of operatives that the Dark Knight was supposedly setting up. The honest agents had transferred or been dealt with, whereas the opportunistic ones had flocked to the crumbling city. Peter didn’t know which of his people would be the one to finally kill him.

In GMY, the Federal Bureau didn’t do much Investigating, anymore, because the national government had basically given up on the city. Some departments said that martial law had been declared, others denied it. Some said that FEMA was putting together a case to kick it out of the country, others said that the law-enforcement organizations were just temporarily going into a “defensive posture”. With two foreign wars, increasingly-violent weather, and a constant superhuman threat, the National Guard was stretched too thin to help, not that the city was a high priority in the first place. Peter looked at it in terms of money. Despite the common claim that GMY was the northern tip of the Rust Belt, its economy was actually thriving. The only problem was that said economy was largely underground. If you were willing to legalize and tax drugs and prostitution, it would definitely be worth the few dozen billion bucks it would take to regain (well, gain) control of the city. Otherwise, you’d just be spending a fortune on a bad-PR money pit that was dragging down the nation’s statistical strength. Nobody wanted to suggest something radical, and it looked like a whole lot of work, so an “I can’t believe that could happen in America” situation continued happening in America.

Peter slid across a marble floor (still no shoes) and made for the press room. Media access to GMY was extremely limited, anymore, for both practical and shady reasons. Sure, certain local news organizations were under the Dark Knight’s protection, but they were considered non-objective by some, since they were in the middle of the action. With the city being so dangerous, the national media had to rely on the GYPD and FBI for most of their info, while those they sent to cover the story holed up in the Plaza or other secure locations, forced to rely on questionable sources both inside and outside the building.

After shooting his cuffs, Peter strolled up to the FBI-seal podium. He looked down. Usually, there were notes on what had transpired during the night, but today, there was nothing. He tried not to look terrified and pulled a spare laptop out from under the podium. Casually flipping it open, he said, “Let’s start off with questions, today.”

Hands shot up, and everyone stared talking over each other. “Is it true that the GYPD is splintering, and that the assassination of Lt. Mitchell was actually carried out by a police sniper?”

“Do we know who was behind the carbomb that took out that Cuban deli?”

“How many civilians died in the shootout between your, uh, security contractors and the Pterodactyl? I’ve seen seven, nine…”

“An alleged captain in Flask’s alleged organization, who was allegedly behind last night’s medical supplies theft, was found with his arms and legs broken, nearly eaten alive by wharf rats. Is it safe to say that the Mercy Cross/51st Street Mosque’s joint medical ward is now under the Dark Knight’s protection?”

Peter coughed. “I’ll be honest with you: I’m really hung over, I just got out of bed with a teenage prostitute, and I’m praying that Google News loads quick so I can pretend to answer your questions.”

They looked at him like he was crazy, but there was no outrage.

He mentally cursed. Just having an illicit affair didn’t seem to make much of a splash, anymore. The public’s standards had either gotten very high or very low. If you wanted national attention, you had to be deep in the closet and working on hypocritical policies, or have a lobbyist friend with connections to an authoritarian regime, or be an alien cultist or something. The public’s tastes were more exotic, now; they wanted something new and exciting, instead of the same old stuff. People would definitely be shocked, but it wouldn’t be enough to dislodge him from his current hell. He’d been explicitly breaking Bureau regs for a while, now, and his superiors were ignoring it. They were too intent on making him the fall guy.

A year ago, Peter had been in charge of the more glamorous Parodiopolis branch of the FBI. It had been an incredibly demanding job--the place was the epicenter for much of the planet’s superhuman activity--but he’d managed to hold his own. Sure, it had destroyed his marriage, spawned various medical and psychological ailments in him, and nearly gotten him killed (nothing like seeing Anvil Man crash through the roof of your SUV), but he’d done much better than his predecessors. In just a few years, he’d managed to cultivate a wide range of sources, put together comprehensive databases, and solve several major mysteries. (SPUD did most of the actual combat, and he wasn’t ashamed of that fact at all. They were better-equipped for it.) Peter had grown up on the outer fringes of power in D.C.; he viewed the FBI as his best way to get himself a little lordship, whether public sector or private sector. And the badge didn’t exactly hurt his self-esteem.

Then, last Christmas, a crazy homeless guy came in, claiming to have information. The office was running low on personnel, and Peter had interviewed him personally. He was wearing what initially resembled a cardboard pope hat, except it had a sort of facemask built into it, as well as antler-esque things. The guy claimed to be a herald of Galactivac. He said that Galactivac was sick, and that he’d soon be coming to Earth. According to this lice-happy expert, Galactivac relied on megafauna-sized protoplasmic bacteria to digest planets. But something had happened, and he needed new bacteria…except it had been extinct outside of his biology for billions of years. The bacteria could only survive in an extremely hot environment, so another herald was growing some in a volcano somewhere. Peter had nodded politely, pretended to take down notes, and sent the guy on his way with a gift card worth two or three meals at a national fast-food chain. They got people like this all the time.

A month later, a Pacific Rim island had been overrun with giant, goopy monsters, who were eventually beamed up by a just-passing-by Galactivac. Almost ten thousand people died. When word got out that the US Government had been warned, and that they hadn’t done anything or alerted anyone, there was international outrage, lawsuits, trade ramifications (China had depended on the island nation for something or other), and several firings. But Peter wasn’t among them. Instead, they gave him a “lateral promotion” to the GMY branch, which was roughly like throwing him out of a plane without a parachute and telling him not to screw up. Nobody wanted the job, so give it to the guy with a proven track-record as an incompetent, and let him take the blame for what was about to happen. GMY was always bad, but a number of factors (DK’s disappearance, Flask being threatened by new competition, the GYPD fracturing, a severe economic downturn) had pushed it to the brink.

To their credit, the GYPD had actually tried to get the city under control, albeit for self-serving reasons. Except they couldn’t. Every day, you’d hear about another three or four cops that had died in the streets. It was starting to make them look weak, so they withdrew to safer areas, staked out favorable positions, and paid some criminals to kill other criminals. Since casualties were down, everyone thought things were going better. A steady stream of cop-deaths made national headlines--poor, usually non-white people dying, not so much.

That was similar to Peter’s situation. He wanted to get fired, but he didn’t want people to get killed because of him, so he was doing the bare minimum to protect what was left of the city’s rancid government and patchwork infrastructure. (Quitting literally wasn’t an option. When his FBI superiors had approved hiring the mercs, they’d ordered them to physically prevent him from ever leaving his post, unless he was accompanied by them.)

His first serious attempt at getting fired had been when the martial law rumors had started. Everyone was wondering why the FBI wasn’t doing more to help. He’d said something like, “Listen, Gothametropolis York doesn’t need the federal government butting in and telling them how to do things. That’s the problem nowadays, everybody expects other people to solve their problems for them. Either fix it or leave. If you’re still here, it’s your own fault. Now, some people will say, well, they’re poor, they can’t leave. I say, if they’re poor, it’s their own fault, too, dammit. You can’t just expect the government to throw money at everything, it’s time for them to take responsibility.” He considered adding a bit about how a single mother, working two jobs but barely scraping by, could surely team up with her neighbors and solve complex economic and crime problems, but he thought it’d be too over-the-top.

He’d expected to be villified as a racist and/or a social darwinist. He’d expected to be fired the next morning. Instead, the President had praised him as an “innovative thinker”, and Serious Pundits had done the same, saying that he’d ushered in a new age of “self-reliance” and “freedom from government dependence”. So, he’d said even more ridiculous stuff, and he still hadn’t gotten fired. There were now websites and blogs devoted to lionizing him. He felt like the American version of Baghdad Bob, and he wasn’t sure if he was being ironic or not, anymore.

Peter was still up at the podium, giving very complex, drawn-out non-answers to questions. He was jonesing bad. An agent came up to him, whispered something in his ear, and actually didn’t shoot him.

“I’ve just been told that the area between North Central Avenue and Eutash Boulevard will now have six hours of electricity a day, instead of nine. This is actually a sign of progress, for reasons my associate here will explain. I’m going back to bed.” Peter stepped lightly to the side and yanked the terrified agent in front of the podium.

---------

The Crime Clown’s first thought was that he shouldn’t have bothered using his holo-disguise, because he’d have blended right in. Plastic, action-figure-like prostitutes were everywhere, as were people on the cutting edge of body-art and piercings. Or maybe he’d have been mistaken for one of the bipolar street performers; there were blood-spattered mimes and chainsaw-jugglers who probably doubled as muscle for the mob. It was raining, of course, and people in tattered hoodies were huddled around metal barrel fires. Dickensian pickpocket children ran wild. They were feeding their video game habit, and they were convinced that the outside world (which they’d never seen with their own eyes) was a myth--that Parodiopolis, that shining marvel across the river, was actually a really big movie set. Sometimes, a sedan-flanked limo would cruise by, or a steroid case in junkyard-metal pterodactyl armor would fly over, and everyone would scatter. With all this, did he really need to bother hiding?

And then he’d see a nine-year-old black kid tagging a wall with DK graffiti, or a zombie-eyed goth girl with Crying Clown makeup, and he’d go back to keeping his head down. Kirk Soren wasn’t crazy.

The city’s demographics were different than the last time he’d visited: the federal government all but pulling out had made it a bastion of Absolute Freedom, so it was a magnet for interesting people. There were smalltime militias, of course, and backwoods polygamy cults. Artistic recluses who were drawn to tragedy and suffering, eco-pacifists that were surprisingly well-armed. Opportunists of all sorts were flocking in. They had something to sell, new scams to try. Likewise, there were people who desperately wanted to get out, but simply didn’t have the money or means. Many of them were doing things they didn’t want to do and taking risks they didn’t want to take, all in the name of eventual escape. For some, the city’s downward spiral had renewed their desire to get out, for others, it had destroyed their chances.

Kirk took in the city and shuddered. It was, in a word, bleak. Grey buildings, black streets, a straitjacket of dark clouds wrapping it all up. The people looked burned out, whether naturally or otherwise. It reminded him of his old life, his colorless life, and he hated it.

This wasn’t how Kirk normally did things. He had a pattern, and he almost always stuck to it. After arriving in the city the job was in, he’d stash extra weapons and supplies in a safe place. (Good luck finding a safe place in GMY.) Then, he’d set up an alternate escape route, going out a different way than he’d come in. (The outside world was doing its best to contain this dystopia, and whether it was on a bridge, at the airport, or on a boat, getting out of the city was extremely difficult. Sure, with all the corruption on the GMY end, you could smuggle in anyone or anything, but it wasn’t a two-way street.) Finally, he’d prepare a distraction of some sort, in case he needed to cover his escape. (The city provided its own violent spectacles, but the populace had become numb to them, and he doubted that one more would make any difference.) So, he was working without a net.

Kirk made his way towards the tallest cluster of skyscrapers. He soon found himself in the midst of several attempted renovations, which had run out of funding before they could be completed. They’d been meant to get people excited about downtown, again, and to increase its earning potential with newer, more modern businesses. Ironically, though they hadn’t worked, the city’s new unstable status had lured in big-name corporations. For a long time, the city’s upper-scale office space had gone unused, creating virtual ghost towers, as no non-criminal locals could afford the lease. But now, with regulation virtually nonexistant, the city was attractive to certain types of businessmen. Sure, the vast majority of the profits were going across the river or out of state, but still.

The building that held Market Research Enterprises was an entropy-ravaged art deco affair, wedged between much taller skyscrapers. Rent-a-cops were drinking coffee and smoking behind presumably bulletproof glass doors. They saw him, radioed it in, and he gave them a cheery wave. One of them hit a button, and a digitally-scratchy voice came through a speaker. “Identify yourself.”

He gave them the fake name that Ms. Jordan had given him.

They reluctantly let him in, and a new batch of armed guards led him through a surprisingly-upscale foyer. Bewildered employees watched Kirk and his paranoid entourage go by. They got further away from the main area of the building, soon reaching their destination, a heavily-locked stairwell. He went through, and they locked it behind him. Single-lightbulb-lit cement stairs went down, ending at an industrial-style door.

Kirk found himself in a wide-open basement that looked like it had once been a parking garage. There were pillars and faded yellow lines. Rebecca Jordan stepped out from behind one of the pillars, smiling. She looked like a poor man’s Lisa: brown hair done in a trendy style, professional (black jacket and slacks, white v-neck top), sexy in a dangerous way. The “dangerous” part was confirmed when she was joined by SWAT-looking private security types. They fanned out on either side of her, aiming automatic rifles at him.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Soren. Please don’t mind my colleagues, they’re just a precaution.”

“I understand completely.” His explosives-launching candy box slid out of his sleeve, and he gripped it firmly.

“Don’t worry, they can’t hear us--I audio-sealed their helmets. This is a little above their pay-grade.” She smiled, again, and that was when he knew that she wanted to be in GMY. It wasn’t a reluctant thing, nor was she just doing it to impress her superiors. Definitely crazier than him.

“So, who am I scaring?”

“His name is Peter Kral. He’s our local FBI director.”

Kirk laughed. “What, the screwup? Isn’t his life bad enough already?”

“Actually, you’ll be improving his life. We want him to do something that’s in his own interests…he just needs a little encouragement, first.”

Glancing around the dreary basement and having second thoughts, Kirk said, “Wouldn’t it be easier to just put him on your unofficial payroll? I’m kinda overkill, for something like that.”

“We tried that approach, but we didn’t have any real success.” She nodded--not in an affirmative way, but indicating the giant duffel bag he had slung over his shoulder. “What’ve you got in there?”

“Oh, this?” He lowered his shoulder and let it fall to the ground roughly; everyone but him and her jumped back. It was good for a chuckle. “I always bring my favorite toys on long trips.”

She smirked, and then turned and made a dismissal gesture to her guards. The lead one disagreed, but she glared at him to press the point, and they filed into a large service elevator.

“You can drop the holo or whatever it is.”

“And what am I getting in return?”

Rebecca rolled her eyes and took off her jacket, revealing bare, tan arms. He deactivated his disguise and let her see his true self.

She procured two ancient, wheeled office chairs from a corner, rolling one over to him. She stradded hers backwards, while he dusted his off and daintily sat down.

Kirk said, “So, is this one of those things where you’re just gonna give me the need-to-know, or do I actually get to find out what’s going on?”

“What do you want to know?”

“ ‘Market Research Enterprises’ ?”

Rebecca chuckled. “We’re distantly related to an extremely boring advertising firm.”

“What, are you doing test-marketing for uzis?”

“Not quite. This isn’t any big secret--at least, not amongst people who travel in our circles. The short version is that my employers view GMY as an early indicator of America’s future economy. It won’t be an exact match, obviously, but…”

“That’s kinda depressing.”

“Economies evolve, just like everything else. Originally, people had needs, and they paid to meet those needs. Later, in developed countries, most of their needs were covered, and they started to have more wants. People in my business eventually got tired of just choosing from the wants that were already there. We’re creative, so we started inventing new ones. But now, basic needs are becoming an issue, again. We’ve got a bunch of psychologists and social scientists, upstairs, and they’re figuring out how to create wants in our current atmosphere. Economic uncertainty leads to fractured psyches, which are actually a lot easier to take advantage of.”

“And the easygoing people of GMY are your guinea pigs for this?”

“Exactly. But, obviously, it’s a dangerous place. Just paying off the GYPD won’t take care of everything, anymore. And some of our psych experiments are a little on the creative side. For all those reasons, having the head of the FBI in our back pocket could come in handy. In return, he’ll have a private-sector job waiting for him after GMY finally falls apart, high seven figures range.”

Soren took it all in. “Wait, didn’t you say he already turned this down?”

“Yeah, that’s why we brought you in.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t waste time scaring him. You have to figure that, say, his possible replacement would be more receptive to it. He dies, everybody takes one step to the right, problem solved.”

“The thing is, you can’t kill him. There are people in Washington that want him to live long and suffer. They aren’t keeping a close watch on him, but if anything major happened to the little crackhead, they’d come down on us hard.”

Kirk shrugged. “If we’re talking kid gloves, it sounds like something your own people could handle.”

“Not exactly,” she admitted. “There’s a little bit of a wrinkle.”

“Uh-huh.”

“We have some competition for him. Some unknown figure took over Deadhead’s crew--out of the King Corridor on the east side--and the GYPD Intelligence Division broke with Flask and aligned with him. Flask used them to build blackmail dossiers and keep tabs on his enemies, so, whoever this guy is, he’s got a ton of data at his disposal. And it looks like he has the same idea we do.”

“Do they have a super-enforcer?”

“Yeah, it’s somebody called the Blue Wraith. He’s pretty new, so we don’t have much on him.”

“That sounds familiar…”

“It’s that old World’s Fair thing, from back when the city was the capital of the world or whatever. We looked into it, and the original exhibit is still gathering dust in the Smithsonian. Just a name.”

Kirk thought about it for a moment. Then, he started laughing. Really laughing. By the time Rebecca reached in her pocket to grab her cell and call for help, he’d chair-rolled the distance between them and slammed her down on the ground, grabbing her by the throat.

“You’re just paying me for intimidation, but--completely coincidentally, I’m sure--you’re putting me in a situation where I could run into some enemies of yours and take care of them for you. That’s a nice way of avoiding expenses.”

“Sm--smart.” She looked terrified, but her nipples were hard, showing through her white shirt. “Okay, geez. C’mon.”

He let go of her, and she coughed and sat up. “If something happens, I want hit money. If not, I’ll take the fee we already agreed on.”

Rebecca pushed herself to her feet, keeping a half-hearted distance between them. “That sounds fair.”

Kirk was rolling around the room on his chair, gleefully spinning in circles. He roared by his duffel bag, snatched it, and pulled a bazooka-looking thing out. “Believe it or not, I’ve already got a plan.”

---------

When the sun went into hiding, Gothametropolis York woke up. Its tepid, washed-out daytime existence transformed into something pulsing with freakish energy, and the city’s population seemed to double. The recently-arrived anarchistic hedonists, who slept during the day, hit the underground club circuit. An ethereal cloud of neon light hovered over Fetishtown, a fever dream that measured ten blocks by ten blocks. The Forty Horseman motorcycle gang (their bikes were decorated with polished equestrian skulls) went looking for trouble. Deals that had been set up earlier in the day went bad, with criminals shooting at each other, cops shooting at each other, or everyone shooting at everyone. Teenage scavengers went searching for food, reduced to merely gathering like their prehistoric ancestors. People with bruises, torn clothes, or minor injuries staggered into clinics and babbled about something that had jumped out of the shadows and mugged whoever was trying to mug them.

Taking it all in, Peter Kral slouched down in his seat and hoped they didn’t get hit with a missile-launcher.

He left the Plaza once or twice a month, to meet with the GYPD’s federal liason. Except it was a different person every time. With the power-struggle that was going on, whoever was winning at the moment would pick their own candidate, and have them meet Peter and push their agenda. They’d want access to one of the federally-protected buildings, presumably to use it for something shady, and Peter would say no. They’d want to know what Peter was telling his superiors, given that they feared federal prosecution, and Peter would play coy and leave them wondering, not telling them that his superiors had been ignoring him for months. (They obviously didn’t fear local prosecution. The GMY D.A. was bought and paid for by Flask, and she allegedly had some sort of creative self-mutilation habit. All she ever did was prosecute rival organizations. Petite, Hispanic prostitutes were disappearing; there was a rumor that the Mayor was terrified to be in the same room with her.)

He’d been called by the usual civilian, GYPD collaborator flunkie, who had the job of telling him who each new liason was and where the meet would be. They always got together at a neutral location, and always at night, as driving away from the Plaza in the daytime just made it easier for people to shoot at you. The rat had sounded a little tense; office politics must be taking a toll. Peter was in plainclothes, and they were in a beat-up-looking van that would hopefully blend right in. The illusion wasn’t perfect, since he was shoulder-to-shoulder with armed, armored guards. He hated being out here. Not merely because it was dangerous, but because it reminded him of how absolutely useless he was. It took everything he had just to play defense on a few key sites. Between Galactivac and GMY, the last year of his life felt like a nightmare.

They turned into an alley behind an antique toy store. A chase car pulled up next to them, carrying more guards. The armored men filed out and secured the location, while he laid on his side on the van’s middle seat, just in case shots started going off. Three minutes later, he was escorted into the building. Having multiple vehicles parked by a boarded-up building would attract attention, so the van and chase car were stashed under tarps that had fake plastic garbage attached to them, making it look like every other trash-filled alley in the city.

Amazingly, the huge store hadn’t been looted, or even vandalized. Peter couldn’t believe it. What, just because it didn’t have any video games? It looked a little familiar to him. There was a giant jack-in-the-box and a giant teddy bear, both the size of small elephants, as well as a model railroad that wound through the store. The shelves were packed with unpackaged toys, including drummer boys, monkeys with cymbals, nutcracker-like wooden soldiers, and hoop-dressed dolls. It had cavernous, arched ceilings, lost to the darkness. The lights, of course, didn’t work. His personal guards were usually stuck standing around in endless hotel halls, and they appreciated being in a more interesting setting. None of them pointed out the fact that the GYPD people usually beat them to the meet location. Then, Peter realized why the store struck a chord.

“Uh, guys? I think this is where the first Crying Clown massacre was.”

It had been reported as a robbery, perpetrated by what the 911 caller described as “a crazy clown guy”. The neighborhood was unimportant, the owner had been reluctant about paying protection money, and the perp sounded like a goof, so the GYPD didn’t exactly break the speed limit to get there. Two napping patrol cops were eventually woken up by the dispatch, and they thought it’d be good for a laugh. Ten minutes later, when they didn’t check in, backup took their sweet time about getting there, as the responding officers were probably just having some fun with the guy. When they arrived, bodies were everywhere, including the original pair of cops. The cash register was untouched. Before it was over, a SWAT team would be slaughtered, the Dark Knight would meet his ultimate enemy, and a legend would be born.

Peter immediately realized that he shouldn’t have said anything, as his personal stormtroopers were getting anxious. He couldn’t believe that the GYPD would choose the store as the meeting place. Then again, it was definitely safe--everybody was afraid to set foot on such a sacred site, which was why it hadn’t been looted. Peter was about to call his sneering GYPD contact when the huge jack-in-the-box started making noise. It was that plinking, monkey-turning-a-handle type of stuff, and it was playing the mulberry bush song. In movies, if you were in a creepy situation, and something unusual started happening, you’d stand there and watch as it built to a climax. In real life, the private soldiers screamed their heads off and blew the jack-in-the-box to pieces before the song had a chance to come to an end. Nothing strange popped out, just shattered gears and warped springs.

While they were all staring at the cordite-tinged dust emanating from the jack-in-the-box, something--actually, several somethings--swung down from the ceiling. They knocked some of the guards over, while just brushing others. Yes, they were bodies, but they were hanging upside down, and their skin had been dyed in festive colors. Human pinatas. They were naked, and their skin had been chemically abused, giving it a crinkly, paper-mache quality. Candy and blood sprinkled out from multiple holes in their corpses. Peter joined several guards in throwing up; it’d be a few minutes before he realized that they must be the GYPD people they were supposed to meet. Then, primary-color explosions started knocking his stormtroopers off their feet, resulting in screams and scorched smells. Their attacker was hidden somewhere in the store, picking them off one at a time. He was firing transparent balloons filled with bright, sloshing acid. Peter had already been hugging the floor, and he wisely stayed down.

For Peter, the events of the next few minutes were strictly determined by sound. He didn’t want to risk raising his head even an inch. There were bursts of gunfire, of course, as well as more “foomph” sounds, with a splash and usually an accompanying screech. The guards who’d been hit were screaming, and it sounded like they were flailing against the floor, as their not-good-enough armor kept clattering on the tiled surface. Soon, the bullets became a less-frequent occurrence, and the private security men went quiet. Peter heard someone laughing.

There were no telltale splotches of acid around him--had he escaped the Crying Clown’s notice, or was he just biding his time? (That being the obvious assumption, regarding their sniper’s identity.) Either way, he was likely dead, and he didn’t want the world to think he’d spent his last few minutes curled up in a fetal position. Peter speed-crawled behind a display of cowboy toys, got to his feet, and pulled his piece. “pulled his piece”--yeah, like he was really tough. He’d barely passed his last range test. Thus far, his biggest field accomplishment involved running away from Anvil Man until Donar had showed up to save him. Peter kept telling himself that, technically, Crying Clown didn’t even have any powers. He was strong, like all insane people, but he was hardly bulletproof. That’s great, he thought to himself. Keep pretending you have a chance.

Peter heard a ripping noise: someone was climbing out of the giant teddy bear, its head halfway torn off, bleeding stuffing from the neck. Of course. He now saw that one of its eyes was hollow, and the lunatic was holding a grenade-launcher-esque weapon with a barrel the same size. Peter aimed his gun, but acid-balloons splashed on tile just five feet in front of him. Running, shooting, and missing wide right, Peter dove behind the remains of the jack-in-the-box. He belatedly remembered his cell. Clutching his gun in one hand and fumbling with his phone in the other, he gave an undignified yelp when something blurred by and sliced both objects in half. It was a purple yo-yo that had razor-sharp wire instead of string. His life, as always, was a horrific blend of comedy and tragedy. But when he looked up, he got some relief.

It wasn’t the Crying Clown, it was…somebody else. He was fluidly weaving between swinging, shoulder-high human pinatas, like a butcher strolling through a meat-locker. Between the bloody candy and the acid-scorched guard flesh, Peter was trying to breathe through his mouth. He dropped the clean-cut gun and phone to free up his hands.

“You’re a surprisingly easy man to get ahold of,” the Crime Clown said, leveling the balloon-launcher at him. “Your friends at Market Research Enterprises wanted us to have a talk.”

“…oh, you’ve gotta be kidding me.” In a city overflowing with common criminals, organized criminals, criminals with badges (GYPD and FBI alike), and costumed criminals, it was an ad agency that had his number?

“It may not feel like it right now, but I’m doing you a favor. My client wants to give you this awesome post-purgatory life. Money, power, probably chicks. You know how many people would kill for something like that? Now, okay, they told me you’re all Mr. Ethical. I don’t know how that matches up with being an alcoholic and your hotel adventures with Slut Lass, but whatever. The city’s screwed whether you play ball or not, you might as well get some gravy along the way.”

Peter had all kinds of responses in his head--some clever, some powerful--but he’d just witnessed multiple homicides, the room stank, he was unarmed and incommunicado, and there was a psycho with a weapon pointed at him, so he found himself unfortunately unable to say them out loud.

“Now, I’m not gonna kill you. I just want to make that clear. But these acid-balloons can, shall we say, disrupt your life. I mean, you like using your hands? Walking? Having sex?”

Peter opened his mouth to reply, only for the Crime Clown to fire an acid-balloon right past him. He jerked backwards, arms flailing, and tripped over a corpse, landing flat on his back. A short, circular wall of dust sprang up around him.

“Take a few minutes to think about it. I’ve got the time.”

In the years since he’d first embraced absurdism, the Crime Clown had witnessed a number of different reactions to his work. There was the typical terror, of course, sometimes accompanied by a reversion to a juvenile or even infantile state of being. As with death, some people would respond with attempts at denial or bargaining. The more higher-functioning ones skipped overt fear and went straight to compliance or resignation. You came across the occasional defiant one, though he suspected most of those were actually self-destructive. Peter Kral, however, reacted in a completely original way.

He started laughing uncontrollably.

For a second, the Crime Clown thought the man had snapped, which seemed to be the worst of all possible scenarios, as it meant that cooperation was out of the question. But, no. It was actually worse than that. For all Kirk Soren talked about changing the world, making it more vivid and fun, he’d never done to somewhat what that toucan had done to him. He’d never truly woken someone up--he’d never provoked a radical transformation in another human being. On a theoretical level, it sounded great. Shake up the sheep and let them join the club! On a practical level, however, it was extremely dangerous. There was no telling what truth he’d caused this lunatic to realize.

Slowly, awkwardly, Peter got to his feet. The Crime Clown kept his weapon trained on him. Between smoker’s-cough laughter and gulps of air, he said, “Thank you.”

“…”

“I mean, I always knew I couldn’t do anything good here. I knew that part.”

“…”

“Oh, sure, I can do the bare minimum. Keep the water running, all that stuff. But anybody’d do that.”

“…”

“After you talked about maiming me…wow. I really thought I was gonna give in. But I can’t. I mean, I literally can’t do anything bad, anymore, and it sucks like you wouldn’t believe. But I didn’t know why until a few minutes ago.”

“You need to shut up and think about your future. My client can give you--”

“Yeah, I know what they can give me. But I’m too selfish to take it. That’s the joke,” he sobbed. Peter was shaking like the semi-addict he was. “I’ve got ten thousand bodies in my nightmares, straight from the sat-footage. Giant alien bacteria strengthening themselves by sucking the fluids out of everybody on that island. If just one more person gets hurt because of me, I’m gonna lose it completely. If I help your bosses stay out of trouble, my life is gonna get worse than it already is. And I care about myself too much to let that happen.”

“That really makes sense, except not.” The Crime Clown pressed the balloon-launcher’s barrel against the side of his head. “If all you care about is number one, it’s time to start dealing.”

Peter laughed through his tears. “I wish I could, but I’m not strong-willed enough to say no to myself. Never have been. I’ve got this, this universe of pain and guilt inside me, and I’m too chicken to add to it. I’m talking real pain, not whatever superficial stuff you’re gonna do. I’m sure you’re great at hurting people, but in my case, it’s kinda pointless. Might as well be throwing water in the ocean.”

The Crime Clown took a step back to think, leaning the balloon-launcher back against his shoulder. Looking at this convoluted, emo wreck of a man reminded him of his pre-awakening self, and it was seriously creepy. Out of nowhere, automatic gunfire strafed both him and the launcher. He went sliding across the filthy floor. Peter Kral immediately ran for the nearest exit, with the speed only a coward can muster.

Partially due to planning, and partially due to luck, there was no blood. Underneath Soren’s crimson clothes was a ridged, plastic skinsuit of his own design. It was breathable, lightweight, and most importantly, bulletproof to a point. Small arms would just make him stagger back; he’d clearly been hit with some type of enhanced ammunition. The balloon-launcher had inadvertantly blocked the shots that would have hit his head. Instead of fighting the momentum, he let it carry him into cover--namely, a tall, carefully-stacked display of antique car and truck toys, which collapsed on him.

His attacker leapt down from the ceiling, landing silently on the floor. The Blue Wraith. His skull helmet and uniform were navy, with a few grey parts. The lenses of his helmet were silver, as were several metallic accessories: bands that covered his forearms, boots, a segmented belt and W-shaped chest harness. His suit was fabric, but Soren guessed that it was a protective, futuristic material. It was impossible to tell what color he was. The Crime Clown saw all this as he peeked out from beneath the pile of toys--he also noticed that the enforcer wasn’t holding any guns. Keeping his distance, the Blue Wraith pointed his arms at the pile and opened fire, titanium-jacketed rounds launching rapidfire out of his armbands.

Staying close to the floor, the Crime Clown groped for his balloon-launcher. But even before he found it, he knew something was wrong: the smell of sizzling metal was filling up the mountain of toy vehicles. Despite the gunfire screaming over him, his thought-process was clear. The balloon-launcher had been hit, the balloons were full of acid, and it had to be rupturing. Sweeping toys out of the way with his arms and legs, he located the launcher, made sure he knew where the Blue Wraith was standing, and gave it a good, hard kick in his direction.

It slid across the floor, bubbling and hissing. The Blue Wraith looked at it curiously for a second, and then fired off a grappling cord from the underside of his armband, swinging away from it right as it blew up. It sent acid splattering everywhere, but he’d already vanished into the darkness near the ceiling. An aisle and its shelves took the brunt of the chemical--they were reduced to flimsy skeletons of ash--but stray drops and streams were still shooting off, so he couldn’t come out just yet. On the other side of the store, the Crime Clown used the opportunity to emerge from the pile, get to his feet, and get some weapons out. He took his smiley-face polymer “balloon” and stretched it into a round shield (the device had two phases, malleable and solid), while holding his explosives-launching candy box in the other hand.

The acid stopped sprinkling. He ducked down a random aisle, keeping his back pressed against the shelves. In a cat-and-mouse game, the Blue Wraith had the obvious advantage, as Soren (correctly) assumed that his helmet had infrared and nightvision. The Crime Clown didn’t have that sort of gear, nor did he technically have any sensory powers, but he did self-medicate with drugs he’d developed on his own. Nothing that would impair his judgment or make him hallucinate, just things to make the world more vibrant. To enhance his experiences. As such, light and motion were much more alive to his chemically-informed artist’s eye than to a normal person’s. That was why the Blue Wraith’s sneak attack wasn’t a surprise.

He raised his shield, blocked what would have been headshots, and returned fire with the candy box. Tiny, bright plastic explosives narrowly missed the Blue Wraith, instead hitting the wall behind him. The force of the blasts knocked him off his feet, but he never flailed…it evolved into a controlled tumble, and he landed and rolled, coming up on all fours and launching himself into an Olympic-speed sprint. The Crime Clown kept shooting, but he always hit wherever the Blue Wraith had been a split-second ago. He switched his aim to where he was going to be. But then, the Blue Wraith seemed to trip and fall flat on his face, right as Soren had been ready to fire. It was no accident--he expertly landed on his side and stayed down, aiming and shooting with both hands.

Titanium-jacketed rounds hit him in the ankles, knocking his legs out from under him. He lost his candy box when he hit the floor. The Blue Wraith was running towards him, but not shooting--he wasn’t going to use his wristguns up close, shots could easily ricochet off the shield and hit him. Soren got to his feet and, once his enemy was in range, swung his shield like a club. The Blue Wraith easily ducked it and lashed out with quick, brutal jabs to his ribcage. Doubled over in pain, the Crime Clown opened his mouth impossibly wide and tried to bring his metal teeth down on a navy-covered arm, but the enforcer withdrew quickly, and he ended up clamping down on the armband, sending sparks everywhere. He used the shield as a club once again, this time hitting him right in the head. They pushed off each other, forcefully separating.

The Crime Clown’s ribs were sore, but not broken--the skinsuit absorbed probably half the impact. The Blue Wraith was dazed from the head-hit and busy making sure the armband wasn’t going to catch on fire or something. Soren quickly squeezed the smiley-face shield into the shape of a long knife and took out one of his metal-core rubber chickens, swinging it like a nunchuk. Rushing the Blue Wraith before he had a chance to use his other, undamaged wristgun, he connected with the chicken (just a body-blow) and missed with the knife. In the time it took to blink, the Blue Wraith elbowed him in the face and kicked him in the stomach, and he staggered backwards.

The Blue Wraith was in the process of aiming at Soren’s head when he threw the knife at him, forcing him to dodge. The knife impaled a sock monkey’s head and stuck in the wall. Soren charged at him, swinging the rubber chicken ahead of him as he went. He caught him in the shoulder. The Blue Wraith rolled away, cartwheeled, and spun, firing off quick shots at intervals. Covering his head with his arms and getting bruised with more gunfire, the Crime Clown grabbed the knife, dove for cover, stretched it back into a shield, and used it while he looked around for his candy box. Unable to find it, he pulled out what appeared to be a water gun.

Acid, of course--but the gun couldn’t hold that much, and the candy box had a much better range. They traded attacks, alternately ducking behind toy store detritus and shooting around corners. The Blue Wraith clipped him in the lower back, while the Crime Clown caused a huge chunk of the ceiling fall on him. And then they both spotted the candy box. Soren assumed the Blue Wraith wouldn’t be crazy enough to shoot at something full of explosives, but he did--except it was with something launched from the side of his armband, as opposed to the wristgun on top. They were tiny, electrified, and sharp: flat, diamond-shaped projectiles that acted as taser-flechettes. A smattering of them impaled the candy-box and fried it, rendering the small device useless. The Crime Clown responded by firing acid. Moving with ease, the enforcer sidestepped the stream of liquid, grabbing a handful of marbles from his belt and throwing them; they were flash-bang rounds, and they rendered Soren temporarily blind and deaf. (The Blue Wraith’s helmet shielded him against sensory attacks.)

Stepping forward to finish him off, the Blue Wraith was suddenly hit by a jagged arc of acid. The Crime Clown was spinning and firing in every direction. It burned like a mother, but it was just a few small splotches on his chest. The uniform and utility harness had actually kept most of it from getting through. He ducked down behind a checkout counter, waiting for him to run out of chemical ammo and reloading his working armband. Since he had time, he quickly inspected the damaged one. The wristgun and taser-flechette launcher were done, but the grappler was fine.

Thirty seconds later, the acid stopped. But Soren had gotten some of his eyesight back, and he was running, bouncing off things like a pinball. The Blue Wraith gave chase, shooting titanium-jacketed rounds and taser-flechettes as he went. He had no idea where this idiot thought he was going--instead of heading for an exit, he was just knocking over displays and glancing off shelves. Desperate. By the time he got full vision back, he’d have painted himself into a corner. He was surprisingly quick, but the Blue Wraith was gaining on him, and he couldn’t keep dodging attacks forever. The Blue Wraith steamrolled through whatever was in his path, including Russian nesting dolls, WWI biplane models, and those wind-up, denture-like teeth that have little feet attached. Unfortunately for him, the teeth fought back.

They jumped like frogs and bit like piranhas. After he knocked over the table, they swarmed him, trying to bite through his suit. His uniform was tough, but they broke skin in a few places. Of course the clown would set up a trap. He batted away the ones trying to get at his neck and groin, wishing that he had a wide-dispersal, nonlethal weapon he could use on them. The slugs from his wristgun would go both through them and through his suit. The ones he knocked off tried to get back on--those, he was able to shoot, but it wasn’t easy, because they wouldn’t hold still. Wasting ammo. A pair of them bit his ankle and hand simultaneously, and he went down, trying to both brush them off and shoot them with his good hand. And then he heard laughter and footfalls and a bizarre zipping noise.

It was the aircutting sound a yo-yo makes when swung quickly, like an old-style slingshot.

Moonlight glinted off the razor-wire “string”, and the Blue Wraith immediately understood that it was a weapon that couldn’t be blocked or otherwise countered. If he was caught within its widening arc, he’d lose a limb, or be decapitated. He tried to get up, but the teeth clamped onto his legs and brought him back down. The Crime Clown was running off-balance, swinging the yo-yo over his head, a look of pure glee on his face. The obvious move was to shoot him before he got close enough to use the yo-yo, but the Blue Wraith doubted he could aim at a medium-range target when he had teeth trying to devour his arms, so he didn’t bother. Instead, he stayed in his unwillingly-crouching position and did his best to herd the teeth onto his back.

Right as the Crime Clown lowered his arm and cracked the yo-yo like a whip, a burst of air appeared underneath the Blue Wraith’s boots, and he rocketed up into the ceiling, crashing into it. Jump-jets, which he’d wisely kept in his proverbial back pocket. The yo-yo’s wire just narrowly missed his feet. As planned, the hopping-mad teeth on his back took the brunt of the impact; they were reduced to white-and-pink shards. And then he was falling. He fired off a grapple-cord, roughly slamming into a wall. Dangling and vulnerable, he shot a volley of taser-flechettes in the Crime Clown’s direction, forcing him to take cover. The Blue Wraith tugged the grappler loose and dropped to the floor, retracting the cord. He reached behind his back and pulled two double-pronged sais from his utility harness. They were dull, rather than sharp, like oversized tuning forks.

Seeing his opponent literally backed against a wall, the Crime Clown speed-staggered out from hiding, once again swinging the yo-yo. The Blue Wraith thumbed a button on each sai, charging the prongs with white, concussive energy. Though the wire’s arc was headed right for his head, he intercepted it with the sai, snapping the cord easily. The yo-yo itself bounced off the wall and clattered to the ground. Assuming that the Blue Wraith would be dead by now, the Crime Clown had gotten dangerously close to him, and the Blue Wraith backhanded him with the sai, sending him flying across the room. If he needed a bladed weapon, his grapplers could detach, but the concussion-sais were much more powerful than that. They delivered incredible, sheer-force shocks when they came in contact with something, which meant practically disintegrating flimsy objects (like the razor cord) and causing thicker objects to be smashed (assuming they were stationary) or violently repelled.

The Crime Clown was sprawled on half-tipped-over shelves, which had tried and failed to start a domino effect when he’d crashed into them. Walking up to him, the Blue Wraith aimed his working armband, smiled beneath his helmet, and nearly tipped over. The room seemed to be rolling wildly beneath his feet, except nothing was being disturbed. Absently, the Blue Wraith remembered how the toy teeth had had something of a liquid sheen to them. Some sort of bio-toxin. They’d only broken through his suit in a few places, delivering a relatively small amount, so it was just now kicking in. Slowly, awkwardly, the Crime Clown slid down to the floor. His fancy clothes were shredded, and there were hairline cracks and puncture-marks in the skinsuit underneath, indicating that some of the bullets, or at least parts of them, had made it through. He couldn’t seem to stand up straight. The Blue Wraith assumed a defensive posture, trying to stay on his feet, while the Crime Clown took out both rubber chickens and started swinging them, a punch-drunk grin on his face.

Had it been straight-up hand-to-hand, the Blue Wraith would have put him down in under two minutes. The only reason the Crime Clown would have lasted that long was because he had the strength and speed of the truly insane. (As SPUD studies have shown, supercriminals with shattered psych-cores can be logical and functional on the surface, but they attack with no inhibition whatsoever, making them seem strangely powerful, and their thought process is much faster than the self-doubting sane, leading to what seems like improbably-athletic reflexes.) But, the Crime Clown had lived as long as he had by setting up favorable circumstances, so he didn’t have to worry about that. The Blue Wraith swung his concussion-sais at him, though his arms felt as stiff and heavy as lead. The Crime Clown dodged and selectively battered his opponent with the metal-core rubber chickens, getting in body-work. But he kept blocking head shots.

After about twenty seconds, the Blue Wraith managed to connect, knocking the wind out of him. He’d turned the power down, as he didn’t want the clown to get knocked out of hand-to-hand range; he was in no shape to dodge any long-distance attacks, nor to aim any of his own. With the Crime Clown staggering back, the Blue Wraith uppercut him with the other sai, making him fall flat on his back. He tackled him. Immediately, he realized it was a mistake, as the clown used the opportunity to try to bite him. He blocked row after row of metal teeth with his already-bitten armband. Then, they both tried to knee each other in the groin, hitting each other’s thighs or hips instead. They rolled around attempting to bludgeon each other, getting only clipped contact. The Blue Wraith eventually managed to strike him in the elbow with a sai, but his arm didn’t break. Once again having the same thought, they headbutted each other at the same time--between a metal helmet and a surgically-reinforced skull, they essentially bounced off each other, tumbling onto their backs and gasping for air.

Neither of them could get up. The Blue Wraith reached into his belt and pulled out a canister about as wide as a pen and half as long, with three barely-visible prongs on the end. Using one of the teeth-bitten holes in his uniform, he jabbed himself in the chest. There was no point in trying to come up with a “universal” antitoxin, as bioweapons were extremely specific and highly diverse; no two worked in the same way. He’d paid a small fortune for this smart antidote. His biological blueprint was somehow programmed into the chemical’s memory, and it created enhanced antibodies that sought out and attacked anything that shouldn’t be there. The antibodies had an extremely short lifespan, they essentially self-destructed after getting the job done. Less than a minute after injection, the cold sweats weren’t as bad, and the world started to hold still. But the Crime Clown was getting up.

The Blue Wraith rolled onto his stomach, aimed his working wristgun, and heard the chamber click. He’d wasted it trying to spray down those stupid jumping teeth. The Crime Clown had his yellow smiley-face polymer out, and he was shaping it into a long, jagged machete. Instinctively, the Blue Wraith reached for the front of his utility harness, where he had more flash-bang rounds--but the acid had melted the compartments shut. His hands felt too numb to effectively wield the concussion-sais (was it because of the toxin or a side-effect of the cure?), which were next to him on the floor. The Crime Clown was all of five feet away. No, wait. The taser-flechettes.

He fired them right at the clown, the sheer force of them knocking him back. Some stuck in his skinsuit, but the electricity didn’t seem to be getting through, as he stayed on his feet. Defensively, he pocketed the machete and covered his unprotected head with his arms. The Blue Wraith struggled to one knee and kept firing, hoping to find a crack or get him in the face, and keeping the freak occupied long enough for him to get more of his strength back. He reached into his belt to get wristgun ammo, but his fingers were fumbling and awkward. Still not enough motor-control. Out of nowhere, the Crime Clown charged, stumbling forward. The Blue Wraith tried to keep aiming high, but the clown brought his arms down, grabbed the other man’s wrist, and pushed the stream of taser-flechettes aside. His teeth snapped hypnotically.

The Blue Wraith understood leverage--even in his weakened, uncoordinated condition, it was easy for him to outmaneuver the clown and shove him into empty shelves. But immediately after that, the Crime Clown flung his machete: about a third of it penetrated his opponent’s suit. It sank into the left side of his stomach. The Blue Wraith stayed upright and stupidly pulled the knife out, wincing, as its serrated edge made removal extremely painful. Tiny ribbons of meat came with it. He immediately felt like an idiot; he could have left it in until afterwards, but now, he had blood-loss to worry about. Right as he was about to use the clown’s own weapon against him, the smiley-face polymer reverted to its moldable form, “melted” all over his hand and arm, and hardened. His working armband was now unusable. While he was distracted by this fact, the Crime Clown nailed him in his wound with one of his rubber chickens. The Blue Wraith fell on the floor. The clown giggled, swung his chickens like a cartoonish ninja master, and went to work.

After several minutes’ worth of battering a stabbed, recovering-from-poison man, the Crime Clown wasted time trying to get his helmet off, only to find it locked tight. While he was up close, the Blue Wraith used the opportunity to hit him in the face with an old-fashioned judo thrust. (Naturally, he used the hand that was coated in rock-hard smiley-face goop, as it’d hurt more.) He then shakily rolled onto his feet. They circled each other, feinting and probing reactions.

The clown sighed. “Geez, man. All this effort, and I’m still not a hundred percent sure on why you want to kill me. Is this some territory thing? Put my head on a stake, warn my client?”

Expecting a dramatic conclusion, the Crime Clown was disappointed when the Blue Wraith coughed with a liquid tinge, went down on one knee, and shuddered. Desperate, he aimed the armband that the clown’s teeth had ravaged.

“C’mon, we both kn--”

With the wristgun and taser-flechettes not working, he instead fired the grappler. It hit the clown right in the knee. While the tip didn’t break through the skinsuit, the force of it was like getting hit with a titanium fastball. He yowled, toppled, and rolled around in pain.

The Blue Wraith hadn’t entirely been acting; he didn’t think he’d be able to get back on his feet. His goop-covered arm cradling his wound, he crawled to one of the sais he’d dropped, rolled onto his side, and hoped enough of his coordination had returned to make this work. When the clown grabbed a display table and pulled himself up, he threw the sai right at his chest. The sai was set on full-power. When it made contact, there was a flash of white energy, and the clown rocketed backwards and crashed through a wall. He didn’t get back up.

Ten minutes later, the clown was still lying in the rubble, drifting in and out of consciousness. The Blue Wraith staggered up and loomed over him. There was a penlike syringe sticking out of his shoulder, which had been full of painkillers. A strange plastic bandage was slapped over his wound. Speaking for the first time, his voice electronically ghostlike, the Blue Wraith whispered, “This isn’t your city.”


---------

It had first come into being as a Squire headline. Despite the more radical and spactacle-like news going on, someone had realized how important this single statistic was. Since then, the two-word phrase had been borrowed endlessly, becoming the name or title of a British rap studio, a novel, countless magazine articles, and a covert high school club deep in the American midwest. There was no doubt that Gothametropolis York was indeed the world’s Suicide Mecca. Not only had the city’s homegrown populace set a statistical record, but they were also importing like-minded colleagues at a rapid rate. If your religion prohibited self-murder, or if you simply didn’t have the guts to do yourself in, just wander around GMY for an hour, and things will take care of themselves.

Peter Kral fell in the latter category. Despite all the talk about suicide being cowardly, he had neither the strength nor the bravery to end his pathetic existence. Instead, he just kept going, naïvely hoping that things wouldn’t get worse. He’d been running for what felt like forever. His cell had been trashed back at the toy store, he was unarmed, and he couldn’t flag down the nearest cop (not that they came into this part of the city all that often) without risking certain death. He wished he’d brought some spare change with him, in the miraculous event that he found a working payphone. But there was hope. On a logical level, he understood that a suit-wearing individual had very little chance of making it home.

The city had been reduced to a blur. There were beatings in progress, gunfights on the side-streets, carnival-barker-like psychos in top hats and glittery suits standing outside stripclubs, promising the impossible and sometimes delivering. He’d been wounded by at least a few hundred glares. Peter hadn’t bothered bringing his wallet, so he was unable to take care of the needs that were wriggling through his nervous-system. The only notable landmark he’d passed by was the GMY Knights’ stadium, where the uzi-toting eco-pacifists were using both the diamond and the outfield to raise small crops and house refugees. (They’d also conquered a good portion of the city’s decaying parks.)

Peter found his destiny among the stripped minivans and day-glo transvestites that inhabited the intersection of 38th and Otash. Ironically, it was right on the edge of one of the “safer” parts of the city. All the signs were there: things became oddly quiet (no cop cars blaring death-metal), the nearby creatures vanished (dealers, prostitutes, and foraging families read the proverbial wind and took off), and an ominous rumbling emanated from a pack of predators (a fringe wing of the Forty Horseman motorcycle gang). Peter found himself surrounded, nearly getting his feet run over by circling hogs. They had chains, baseball bats, small arms.

He tried to make the obligatory show of fear, but he couldn’t dredge any up. He was glad it was over.

The streetlights all went off at once, and there was a rustling sound above them. In the dark, he heard bones splintering and wet noises; riderless motorcycles began to crash into rust-crippled cars and boarded-up buildings. When they exploded, he caught strobing glimpses of what was going on. Shurikens blowing tires and flipping bikes forward. Leather-clad bodybuilders getting cords wrapped around their necks or wrists and being yanked into the night. Chains flying through the air and knocking middle-aged gangbangers unconscious. Soon, there were small fires and a chorus of groans. Peter tried to run again when something grabbing him by the scruff of the neck. He screamed, dry-heaved, watched the world rise and fall beneath him at a terrifying speed. Peter ended up bouncing across a rooftop a block away.

Crawling around like a baby, he spun and desperately tried to locate his “savior”, though he already knew who it was. Two blank eyes stared at him from oily shadows. His voice was willfully inhuman, as rough and barren as an endless desert.

“Director Kral.”

“Uh, this is--”

“I’m afraid I can’t allow your life to end that easily.”

Peter just stared at him, dumbfounded.

“You don’t have to be the scapegoat, Kral. And your current position isn’t as weak as you make it out to be. I’m going to see to it that you’re…useful.”

“Out of the frying pan and into the fire, huh?”

“I have plans for you. Once those plans have been carried out, your life will be yours, again, free to use or lose as you see fit. But until then--”

“--I belong to you?”

“No. You belong to the ten thousand people you failed, and the ten million people you could help.”

As in the toy store, Peter didn’t say yes because it was the right thing to do, or because there was an incredible amount of latent courage just waiting to be activated in him. He said yes because it was the most selfish option available. With a little guilt out of the way, maybe his last few months wouldn’t be quite as bad, even if he had to spend them in the second-last place he wanted to be…


---------


In Kirk Soren’s line of work, losing usually meant one of three things: you woke up in jail, you woke up naked and strapped to a torture-table, or you didn’t wake up at all. As such, he was remarkably surprised to find himself in a plain-white hell room that didn’t immediately resemble any of those endings.

The SPUD-issue body-bag nearly smothered him. After awkwardly forcing his arms out, he struggled to sit up, hearing the zipper retreat. The room was white, but it wasn’t padded. No furniture, no doors or windows, no electrical outlets. There wasn’t even a visible source of light, though he could see everything. Stretching his arm out produced no shadow. Despite the stenciled yellow print on the body-bag, he doubted it was SPUD; the administration had forbidden them to operate in GMY. A putrid fog was clinging to him, but he knew what that was. His clothes had been either destroyed or removed; he just had his not-in-the-best-shape skinsuit on. No toys.

Kirk carefully crawled out of the bag, waves of pain spreading like three-dimensional stains, ricocheting off his fleshy shell, and crashing back into each other. He wasn’t bleeding too bad. There were failed toolmarks on his skinsuit, explaining why his last line of defense had been activated. He could feel it vibrating steadily against the small of his back. Kirk was about to start giving the room a closer look when security-camera-sized cannons popped out of the ceiling corners, whirring and swiveling back and forth.

“Now, that? That’s a nice trick.” The voice was coming over some unseen intercom. “It’s like something on the Discovery Channel--your little natural defense mechanism.”

The skinsuit was rigged with a tiny bio-weapon, which would be activated if someone tried to remove said skinsuit without knowing the special way to do it. (Kirk had obviously immunized himself to it.) The vapor it released wasn’t just a toxin, however…it was laced with vaguely acidic properties. It didn’t have much of a range, but if you got too close to him, anything inorganic (other than the skinsuit, was had been treated) would sag, if not outright melt. Once, he’d blundered into a SPUD undercover operation and gotten captured--but when they tried to remove the skinsuit in the mini-hovercarrier, the vapor had been activated. They’d sent in people in hazmat suits, only for the suits to be seriously degraded. The panic and confusion had made escaping a whole lot easier.

This time, however…they had him in a room that was definitely secure, and they’d gotten him there using a body-bag that had been designed to keep biohazardous superhuman corpses from leaking. He was a sitting duck for those auto-guns.

A long, rectangular section of the white wall slid away, revealing a mirror that became a window. On the other side was a well-dressed white guy in his late twenties or early thirties--he was flanked by thuggish security men. He had thick black hair, and he wore a black suit, a black tie, and a purple button-down shirt. One hand was in his pocket, the other gestured as he spoke. “I’m never sure how to talk to you people. I mean, do you prefer Mr. Soren, Kirk, the Crime Clown…?”

Kirk’s memory failed him. “Am I supposed to know you?”

“Not really. You might have seen my last name in some history books, though. I’m Jeremy Carmichael.”

“Let me guess, your great-great-grandfather invented the ether-engine.”

“Hey, you got the time-period right, that’s more than most people,” Jeremy said. “And in case you’re wondering--yes, that’s bulletproof glass. I don’t think even your funhouse-mirror teeth could get through.”

“Ahh, but what if I have another toy hidden away?”

“We x-rayed you.”

Kirk’s mouth didn’t curse, but his expression surely did.

“I was hoping you’d be ready to talk.”

Exhausted, Kirk yawned. “What’s there to talk about? I mean, I’m assuming you’re the Mystery Gangster ruling the King Corridor, and I’m also assuming this is all about sending a message to my client, so just kill me and get it over with. No regrets here. I lived more in the last eight years than I did the rest of my godforsaken life.”

“Easy on the clichés. You weren’t the target: the Blue Wraith was trying to secure a potential asset, same as you.” Jeremy excused his guards. Once the door on the other side of the glass was closed, he said, “But that asset--our substance-abusing FBI friend--turned out to be too unstable to use. You, on the other hand…”

Kirk abruptly stood and saluted him. “It is seriously awesome to meet someone, anyone that recognizes me as part of the sane brotherhood of man, but you’re gonna have to find another clown to pimp out. I’m strictly a freelancer, and I hate wearing heels.”

“So if you have to choose between working for me and death…?”

“Choosing between living in GMY and death. Mmmmmm…I’m gonna have to go with death. And, no offense, but you’re kind of a disappointment. Oooh, scary, a guy in a suit. I expected something weird and cool. Geez, you’re not even disfigured.”

Jeremy smirked. “I can’t blame you for not wanting to live here--the city isn’t exactly at its peak, right now. But I’m planning to change that.”

“Yeah, right. This place’s been near-death for almost a century, you’re just another vulture. Actually, no, you’re not even that. The vultures showed up back when baseball was still a big deal, but you just got here--so I guess you must’ve been waiting for things to get even worse. Not brave enough to come until it’s officially doomed, huh? I’m an artist, I like ambition…and you ain’t got any.”

Anger skittered across his face. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised at what I know. Let me give you a ‘for instance’. You’re keeping your hand in your pocket, and you look a little sick. I’m no detective, but, c’mon. Let’s see--you had to freeze my polymer off, and you got some ice-burns in the process? And you got treated for the poison, but you’re still shaky.”

Jeremy removed a bandage-wrapped hand from his pocket.

“Yup, thought so. As such, I offer you a sincere, heartfelt apology. You aren’t just another empty suit after all.”

Taking a corkscrew-corded controller in his good hand, Jeremy fondled a red button. Then, he frowned, putting it back up. “I’m gonna make my pitch to you. You can decide either way, and we’ll go from there. But just think about this: this city could be a blank canvass for you, and you could have the ultimate captive audience.”


---------

The Crime Clown didn’t hear the entire story, that night. It came in bits and pieces over the next few months. But even from the beginning, he understood that he’d been wrong--Jeremy Carmichael wasn’t a normal GMY mobster. Not even close.

Consider 19th century Gothametropolis York. As with the downfall of any mythic utopia, there was a proliferation of that most glorious hybrid: conspiracy-theorizing blame gaming. Only instead of discussing whether it was Adam’s mistake, Eve’s plan, the serpent’s miscalculation, or Yahweh’s fault for being a tease and putting the tree there in the first place, it was a matter of economics and history. Some said there was nothing unusual about it, that it was the same industrial senility that eventually gripped cities like Detroit and Chicago. One school of thought claimed that some sort of mystic painting was involved, stealing power from GMY and giving it to the newborn, omen-crowned Parodiopolis. The plutocrat-friendly papers (it was one thing to be owned by them, quite another to be getting nothing but still a huge fan) accused the mystery-man known as the Alienist, either a serial killer or a vigilante, of orchestrating the destruction of the city’s then-backbone.

Unsurprisingly, in Jeremy Carmichael’s version of the tale, his family factored in heavily. So too did the GMY Squire.

In the final quarter of the 1800s, Gothametropolis York was considered the capital of the world, its empty horizon seemingly indicating no future competition. It was a gaslit marvel of iron and concrete, beating its own sky-scraper records with each new year. There were roaming hordes of volunteer firefighters who frequently brawled over turf, extended families of twenty or thirty (immigrants and otherwise) crammed into tiny rooms above health-hazard grocers, and roustabouts lurking for work on every corner. A brew of steam, clockwork, and ore made the city wealthy while taking away the moon and stars, leaving the people to go home under chemical-smear skies and walk-up monoliths. As it turned out, manmade settings weren’t any different than natural settings; both were undeniably majestic, and both were undeniably vicious.

The Carmichaels ruled it all from their ancestral manse. They were foremost among the city’s gentry, their respect above question. This despite everyone knowing that their wealth flowed from backstreet factories and textile plants. From hard labor, child labor, immigrant-exploitation labor, sixteen-hour-workday labor, and often all of those at once. Raising doubts about the glories of the free market meant being smeared as a socialist, anarchist, or some other unpatriotic breed of -ist. And how could you argue with results? They’d helped turn a mid-size port city into an industrial juggernaut, or rather, into the industrial juggernaut. “History will vindicate us,” Elijah Carmichael had cried at a birthday feast for the famously-corrupt, future assassination victim President McKinley.

Contrary to populist belief, the Carmichaels were more desperate than evil. Like many aristocrats, they’d been shocked to find out that, strangely enough, some people thought that the fancy talk associated with the American Experiment was actually meant to be taken literally. A whole new egalitarian society and all that. To them, the century-old revolution had simply been about gaining autonomy from a distant crown--those flowery, idealistic documents were all well and good, so long as they didn’t apply to the wrong sorts of people. Their worldview was still one of lords and peasants, with no in-between. And now, they believed, through some ritualistic, subconscious logic, that if they themselves acted like (now corporate) feudalists, feudalism itself would magically return. Its failure to do so was strictly the universe’s fault, as opposed to an error on their part.

The Carmichaels had prepared themselves for all the threats their past- and present-based mindset could conceive of. Strikes, crusading politicians, various external economic threats, rabble-rousing preachers. Unsurprisingly, it was an entirely new factor that brought them crashing down. American newspapers been around longer than America itself, beginning as subversive broadsheets that had fostered a violent revolution. In the late 1800s, they fell into two distinct categories--the papers that were essentially mouthpieces for their owners, and the papers that lazily mixed fact with fiction, hoping that more entertainment would lead to more sales. (The latter category of paper would have completely true stories on page one, and only-sometimes-accurate stories about death rays and flying machines on page fifteen.)

And then came the muckrakers. Though they traded in gossip and innuendo, these journalists were still more hard-hitting and truthful than their taken-seriously colleagues, speaking truth to power as the spiritual descendents of their revolution counterparts. Media, previously seen as either a useful diversion for the masses or a useful means of influencing the body politic, had seemingly been taken over by commoners. And the Carmichaels were one of their prime targets. They thought of yellow journalism as a fad, piggybacking on the “social justice” religious nonsense that the hardcore emancipation people had made famous. But the outrage the coverage sparked was bigger, longer-lasting, and more intense than they’d anticipated. The casual corruption in GMY became front-page news seven days a week. Locally, the authorities knew which side their bread was buttered on, so they refused to make changes and took heavy damage as a result. It seemed like merely another storm to be weathered.

And it might have been, if the city existed in a vacuum. But the situation had become national news. There were Senate hearings, long-overdue changes to the law, and increased federal regulation, and the Squire eventually had a headline that took up the entire top half of the front page, which read, “ELIJAH CARMICHAEL JR. INDICTED ON MULTIPLE COUNTS”.

By this point, the Carmichael family had branched out as sturdy and wide as a redwood. Heirs and heiresses overflowed in their original estate, Victorian townhouses in the city, upscale apartments that were right across from their financial concerns, and entire blocks of hotel rooms at the Plaza and other fine establishments. They could only watch in horror as their gravy train barreled off a cliff. Some of them were indeed tried and convicted, while others beat the charges at great cost to their health and wealth, or betrayed their blood in a surprisingly professional manner. Most of the women went into seclusion out of shame at what society had done to them. A few sub-families went on the run, never to be seen again. (This provided an interesting twist on the “Surprise, you’re actually royalty/wealthy” plot-archetype, where you find out that you’re not the son or daughter of a millworker, but of a blueblood, albeit a fugitive one.)

There was one last scenario, however. If your involvement in or knowledge of the illegal end had been minimal, you remained free, if not clear. The Carmichaels owed the government tons in back taxes, were facing multiple civil lawsuits, and had drained their fortune trying to keep their latest generation of patriarchs out of jail. What little remained had been frozen by the feds. As such, the remaining Carmichaels had gone from upper-class lords to middle-class slaves, yoked to multiple garnishments and liens and apocryphal taxation trickiness saved for just these sorts of situations. They vowed to overcome it all and regain their social standing.

Unsurprisingly, they didn’t. Generations later, the Carmichaels were all but forgotten to the modern world, as new waves of vanquished foes piled on top of them in history’s trashcan. Jeremy’s family had ended up in the Pacific Northwest, where they lived in uncomfortable anonymity. His great-grandparents had gone the “stay and pay” route. They thought they’d be somehow rewarded for doing the right thing; instead, they received mocking, scorn, and alienation. As such, the elder members of his family were happy as they slipped from the public imagination, but the younger members (including his parents) resented the hell that was normalcy.

His father in particular had a seething hatred for both the government and the media. Pete Carmichael was often in trouble with the IRS, the cops (strictly lame stuff like check kiting), and other bureaucratic outposts. His mother had married him based on the hope that some tiny trace of aristocracy still existed in him, enough to propel them up the class ladder--it hadn’t happened, and she alternately blamed a vague conspiracy against them and Pete himself.

Their house had only one real rule, which, if broken, would unleash an incomprehensible amount of fury: you didn’t mention that city.

Some boys got flashlights and looked at certain types of magazines under the covers. Jeremy had lied about playing with friends, snuck to the library, and read the GMY Squire. The city had obviously fallen apart; he viewed it as a matter of karma. Ultimately, the things that had brought the Carmichaels down--unions, the media, fair-weather populism--had become problems themselves. Whether they’d been corrupted by the types of plutocrats they’d worked to dethrone, or whether the corruption had been their own doing, was hard to say. Probably a little of both. His father enjoyed what he viewed as a comeuppance, but Jeremy was always troubled by it. It was, after all, their city. Or it was supposed to be, anyway. When they’d had control, GMY had been unstoppable, and once they lost it, everything went wrong. It seemed to him that they had a responsibility to fix things.

But how would someone even go about that? Jeremy, now a teenager, considered the question on what he pretended was a strictly hypothetical level. A politician couldn’t handle it…they’d be bought off, or intimidated, or killed. A vigilante would run into the same kind of resistance. If you had, say, a few hundred million bucks, you could create jobs and engage in philanthropy, but you’d still have to deal with the people actually running GMY. And that was when Jeremy realized the truth--that it’d be easier to subvert the status quo, as opposed to trying to fight it outright. Instead of looking at the mob as the problem, turn it into the solution. Organized crime controls the city. To get things back on track, control organized crime. In a freezing January, standing in a cobweb-choked shed, Jeremy Carmichael decided the fate of a city.

His early training was far from exotic. Six a.m. runs through misty pine forests, over gravel-strewn country roads, and up and down bleacher stairs. Monklike eating and sleeping habits. He’d swipe one of his father’s pistols, sneak out to a section of grown-over fence, and shoot beer bottles off the posts. Being unable to afford any sort of martial arts classes, he had to settle for getting into fights and learning on the job. He went from being a nobody with a vaguely-familiar name to being the class crazy. Toting around books on warfare, psychology, and crime, always super-serious, provoking violence for no logical (or at least known) reason. His week-long suspensions just meant more time for him to improve his aim. He hunted deer with a rifle, a bow, a knife, and graduated to his bare hands. His grades, which had always ranged from below-average to barely-average, suddenly skyrocketed. It was clear he wasn’t cheating, and his teachers didn’t know how to take this prodigy that had allegedly hospitalized the Anderson boy.

This went on for three years. He’d been in and out of juvie, but after crippling a lumberjack kid that had tried to rape a girl from his school, the Sheriff’s Department was determined to put him away for good. Jeremy responded by bludgeoning a deputy with his own nightstick and vanishing.

Armed with nothing but the nightstick and his wits, Jeremy went down the coast to L.A. and lived on the streets for a few months. He’d never spent any significant time in a city, before, and he needed to understand how they worked for the next part of his plan. Jeremy ate in homeless shelters and slept in hidden places. He viewed it as an organic being, each person a cell with a specific purpose or nature. Watching and learning the dynamics. Soon, he ran into a Hispanic kid he’d gone to school with, who’d dropped out and moved back to L.A. The kid knew his rep, and, with the help of his older brother, brought him into their gang. They had a flimsy cover story about him being their biracial cousin from Tucson. Jeremy had always planned to do this, but he’d been afraid that he’d get stuck joining a weak, small skinhead gang.

He started out as a wheelman and was promoted to soldier in no time at all. This meant strongarm jobs (enforcement, debt-collection), burglary, and armed robbery. Jeremy had never felt any particular connection to society, beyond his family owning GMY, so he had no problem with it. Soon, he had his first body. He was a natural triggerman. Most of his colleagues (in his gang and others) were either corner-cutting, drug-addicted, or otherwise unstable, making it easy for him to get noticed and establish himself as competent and reliable. At the same time, the cops couldn’t tie his killings together. He wasn’t limited to just using one type of weapon (assuming he used a weapon at all), and he always managed to avoid being seriously witnessed. The best they ever got was “a white or Hispanic guy in his early twenties”.

The cartel that supplied his gang became interested in him, and they bought out his proverbial contract and took him on. His friend’s brother, who’d moved up the chain of command based on his ability to identify good personnel, wasn’t happy about losing such a good employee, but he wasn’t entirely sad to see him go, either. He was popular, and that meant he was a threat to his power. Jeremy was fine with the move; he’d gotten too big for just one city. He did contract-killer work in Hong Kong, Beirut, Rio, Tokyo, and Miami. He lived with strippers, fashion model drug-dealers, and the daughters of corrupt politicians. During an extended stint in a Central American military dictatorship, he did wetworks and received advanced combat training. In fact, he learned and networked everywhere he went, picking up new skills and making new friends with each job. He found himself receiving percentages from profitable operations he’d helped out.

Once he had everything he needed (from this stage, anyway), he set his trifecta in motion. The first step was to discreetly start a civil war within the cartel, which was surprisingly easy, as things were always tense to begin with. A shipment vanished, a vocal lieutenant in one faction was killed. It was just a matter of antagonizing those with the shortest fuses and playing to long-held fears. The second step was to anger a rival cartel, which was a little harder. He arranged it so that one of their enemies’ younger sisters, who was an addict, received some bad product that traced back to them. He set up a few murder scenes--sometimes people on his side, sometimes people on the other side--that were meant to mislead and provoke. The third step was to dime his cartel out to Interpol and SPUD, which was incredibly fun. All at once, they were embroiled in an internal war, a turf war, and a legal war. Bodies were falling, people were hiding. Jeremy laid low and aroused no suspicion in the process.

He had certain needs, and with everything that was going on, those needs were much easier to meet. The weak cartel members were weeded out, giving him a pool of elite employees to choose from. Higher-ups died and left behind secret bank accounts that he knew how to access, giving him even more money. And the cartel ultimately broke up, giving him his freedom.

He went to Gothametropolis York for the first time in his life. It was everything he’d imagined--all stoicism and steel, an architectural graveyard. This was right before things completely went to hell, when there were merely rumors about the government preparing to abandon the city. The Dark Knight was MIA, the Crying Clown was presumed dead, and Flask was fading. GMY needed a new dominant personality. Jeremy set up shop in the King Corridor, ruled by the low-on-the-food-chain freak known as Deadhead. He’d brought two dozen ex-cartel people with him; they needed new jobs and appreciated his rep. The most important person was his girlfriend, a South African engineer who was going to handle his tech. He came up with the idea of the Blue Wraith identity, wanting to use a name from the city’s happier past. Deadhead’s thugs were little more than practice, and his hitmen were slightly harder, but the man himself was a huge disappointment. After that night, King’s Corridor was his.

The late freak’s surviving employees defected immediately. Soldiers and dealers were flocking to him. The GYPD Intel people had sized him up and decided he was the new hot ticket.

Using the money he’d earned and stolen, Jeremy became a silent (albeit controlling) partner in a major corporation. Once, when desperate, they’d borrowed money from a front group for the cartel. Jeremy had blackmail folders on half their board. Every other amorally-ambitious company in the world was moving to GMY to either bleed it dry or use the population as borderline slave-labor, but he was in the process of forcing his corporation to move in and give people jobs. He had charity stuff in the works, as well; community activist Mallory Bell needed a financial backer for a new shelter, and he planned on being it. By no means did he care about the people who lived there. The city was a status-symbol for his family--a sort of barometer that indicated how they were doing. The better it looked, the better they looked.

In the big picture, his plan was simple: he was going to restore the city to its former glory. The feds pulling out would make it that much easier. It had taken a while for him to fully grasp it, but he came to understand that Gothametropolis York had made the classic blunder of modernity. The city had become king of the hill because of extremely unethical labor practices and business dealings. Contrary to popular belief, morality increases with time, and the twentieth century demanded that the city shape up. It did, and it not-so-coincidentally collapsed afterwards. It was like fighting with one hand tied behind your back. If someone else had “evil” advantages and you didn’t, you lost, whether you worked hard or not. Jeremy watched as jobs were outsourced to places like India and China. As with his ancestors, they paid little and required much, and they were thriving. Caring about the trees--good working conditions, good healthcare--only weakened the forest. If you wanted to be strong on a macro level, you had to make some sacrifices on the micro level.

GMY had given civilization a shot, and it wasn’t working. Someone had to be the adult and go back to what did work. Jeremy was going to make the city a powerhouse, again. They wouldn’t have the luxuries (ideological or otherwise) of the twentieth century, but they wouldn’t have the weaknesses, either. Jeremy knew he’d win. There were old ways, proven ways, and he was going to use them--even if everyone else became “enlightened”, even if they were the last place on earth that didn’t change.

And if the plan ended up involving, say, blowing up the Squire’s building, so much the better…

---------

In the end, Kirk Soren couldn’t figure out whether he was daring or lazy. On one hand, it seemed impossible for his bright absurdism to make a dent in GMY’s dreary public consciousness. The city’s desperation seemed to drown out everything else. But on the other, maybe his style, being so different from what the city usually dealt with, would stand out like a beacon. Maybe it’d be more challenging for him to do his art in a place that was already shiny and strange, like Parodiopolis. Kirk didn’t know if this was the safe route or the ambitious one. He had, however, had another realization--of the magnitude of his original toucan-inspired epiphany--and he wasn’t particularly enjoying it.

The neighborhood known as Lawton made sense if you thought of power as a fast-spreading virus. It was clustered heavily in the center, and it gradually became less severe as you radiated outwards. This was Flask’s stronghold, a series of gated communities within gated communities: not all that different from the walled cities of old, which often had a military-minded outer wall, a riffraff-separating inner wall, and a forbidden temple at the center. From the sky, it looked like an irregular bullseye. Everyone who lived there was in servitude to Flask. He and his inner circle (which included lawyers, accountants, local politicos, and CEOs) occupied the core, while the next level was for super-enforcers, captains, and less-important politicians. The third layer held a surprisingly large, middle-class criminal bureaucracy, consisting of high-ranking cops, mob-collaborating business owners, and specialists (triggermen, chemists, hackers), all of whom kept Flask’s unwieldy organization glued together. Finally, the outermost ring was for tattoo-breathed soldiers and uniform cops, who were one screwup away from going back to living in a walk-up hellhole.

Lawton looked faintly ridiculous--an island of suburbia in the thick of a concrete wasteland. It was freshly landscaped, patrolled by tricked-out GYPD rigs and sedans with no license plates. The territory immediately surrounding it was also Flask-controlled. This was their home turf, where they’d hunkered down for the coming storm. Local hotties who’d turned collaborator and married the winning side (mob wives and cop wives looked and dressed about the same) could sunbathe in the front yard without fear. The schools were all private…abandoned husks of public education were used for storage or offices. Overall, Lawton seemed like a horrifically-miscast movie: flamboyant pimps daytiming as paper-hat employees at spotless, overpriced grocery stores; skinheads kissing their inevitably-blonde significant others and holstering their glocks before going to work; sisters of crimelords walking lapdogs while wearing thousand-dollar shoes and gobs of blue eyeshadow.

The man nicknamed “Jimmy Shy” stared at this white-picket-fence world from inside a GYPD third-ring safehouse. The wives, fiancees, girlfriends, and occasionally daughters of corrupt police lieutenants and expatriated South American dealers were mowing their lawns in bikini tops and cutoffs, bending over to get groceries out of SUVs and exposing tattoos and/or thongs in the process, and generally acting like open curtains were actually closed. Out on the street--that alien world two miles away--siding with Flask had seemed like a risky proposition, but here, it made perfect sense.

Jimmy Shy was newly middle-aged, stocky and harmless, with a goatee that had failed to keep the baby out of his face. In addition to his trademark porkpie hat, ninety percent of his shirts fell into either the Hawaiian category or the bowling category. He’d always described his job as being about introductions. During his tenure as the most noteworthy middleman in GMY, he could hook you up with whoever or whatever you needed. Drugs? Guns? Girls? Building supplies? Safecrackers? Not only was he like a walking catalog, he had the added benefit of being objective. Jimmy Shy had frequently described himself as possessing the neutrality of Switzerland. A lot of middlemen were financially predisposed to steer clients towards friends or inferior product, but Jimmy was the one universally-trusted criminal in the city. Everybody left him alone. It wasn’t that they all liked him, they just didn’t want to have to ask their business partner or employee or boss about how to cheaply get ahold of an industrial quantity of glue, either because they didn’t want to seem stupid or because they didn’t trust them to give an unbiased answer. But, Jimmy Shy? He knows everybody. And, hey, it isn’t like he has the stones to try anything.

His last middleman job--literally, in fact, his last--had been pretty expansive. He’d been working with Mr. Plastic, the masked gangster who specialized in debt-slavery. With GMY slowly devolving to a feudalistic bartering economy, he’d get people owing him money, knowing full well they wouldn’t be able to pay--instead of requiring cash, he’d require labor. He then contracted them out to a variety of parties. Mr. Plastic wanted SPUD-issue body-armor (nothing exoskel, just the sort of thing soldiers in Iraq wish they had), and Jimmy Shy had managed to procure some for him. Fell off a hovercarrier, etc. But then, some of Flask’s goons had grabbed him up, bringing him to Kate Heardt, the self-scarring district attorney that everyone was terrified of. She gave him the option of testifying against some of Mr. Plastic’s captains--Flask used the D.A’s office to strafe his rivals--or becoming her new “playmate”. Despite a more-than-healthy libido, he chose the former option. As such, he was now tucked away in a safehouse, in a well-guarded compound, in a collection of neighborhoods owned by the man himself.

Jimmy Shy’s approach to security had, frankly, been faith-based. With the city getting worse, it made sense to finally pick a side. Surrounded by the secluded serenity of Lawton, Flask seemed as powerful as ever; if Jimmy still kept in contact with his old buddies, he’d have known the truth. He’d had to cut off communication with everyone, just for his own safety. Jimmy didn’t know about the GYPD splintering. Jimmy didn’t know about how Flask’s territory was slowly shrinking. Jimmy didn’t know about anyone called the Blue Wraith.

There wasn’t going to be any trial. Once or twice a week, Jimmy video-conferenced with an impaneled grand jury, or acted as an informant for wiretap warrants, search warrants, or arrest warrants. Granted, the grand juries were full of Flask-friendly ringers, the judges were bought off, and it would’ve been easy to surveil them illegally. For that matter, they could’ve just killed Mr. Plastic’s guys. But why do that when you can do a little freeze-seize on their assets? Killing them is nice (and can be taken care of via inmates once they’re locked up), but legally getting ahold of their business operations and bank accounts is what really matters. And, hey, if the GYPD busts up one of Mr. Plastic’s slaver prostitution rings (based off a tip from Jimmy Shy, of course), and most of them fall through the cracks and end up working for Flask’s pimps downtown, well, who’s to say how it happened?

At the moment, Jimmy Shy didn’t care about any of that. He was strictly concerned with Lawton gossip. The fortress-like suburban neighborhood generated enough drama to fill dozens of soap operas: betrayals, secret alliances, affairs, scheming, intrigue (some living within the walls were spies from other mobs), and various types of cons. Jimmy’d never been much of a reader or a TV watcher, and the video games they’d gotten him were entertaining enough, but after a month of playing the same ones over and over, he was bored. What he really wanted to do was go exploring in Lawton. He’d spent his entire life in GMY, but he’d never been in its lawn-and-garage oasis. And the gossip his rotating shifts of guards discussed was much more entertaining than daytime TV. He wasn’t allowed to go outside (it was safe, but for him, it wasn’t that safe), so he had to be a voyeur, instead of a participant. Often literally--the dark-brown-haired, ex-bartender (according to one of his guards) housewife next door had noticed him and smiled at him on multiple occasions; watching her get a tan in her backyard was now the highlight of his day.

The only consideration Jimmy had gotten involved his chihuahuas. He had no immediate family and no real friends, but he wasn’t going anywhere without his dogs. Strangely, instead of fighting, they were the types of dogs that acted as a search engine or other methodical computer program--if one found something, the others would quickly arrive to investigate it and its surroundings from every possible angle. One would lick, one would sniff, one would attempt to jump up on it. His bodyguards, of course, hated them, so he had to keep them confined to the second-story rooms (it was a decently big house; he got the impression that he wasn’t going to be the only oddball witness living there, which sounded like a sitcom waiting to happen) and the backyard. Today, though, they were oddly quiet. He wasn’t complaining, as the lack of yapping interruptions had enabled him to find out the latest developments in several key marriages.

There were always three bodyguards--one by the back door (the front door was bricked over from the inside: they didn’t use it, as they didn’t want anyone to see their comings or goings), and two wandering around the house. Jimmy was in the living room with two of the more likeable guards when the fire-sprinklers went off. (In addition to a top-end security system, the house had sprinklers, gas masks, first aid kits, and at least one gun-locker.)

“Aww, dammit, Leon’s smoking again. Somebody find that f--”

It didn’t feel like water. Not because it was an advanced fire-retarding chemical, but because it served another purpose entirely. The clear liquid clung like glue and began turning fire-engine red and demonic white. As the thick, oozing stuff began to droop down both people and objects, jagged stripes were created. The sprinklers were pumping out much quicker and more powerfully than they should have been; it was like getting hit with hundreds of tiny paintballs. Then, in mere seconds, it hardened. Jimmy Shy, who’d been afraid of getting the stuff in his eyes, had ducked behind a couch and covered his face, but his tough-guy guards hadn’t bothered, and they suddenly found themselves immobile and unable to see, hear, or even breathe, as coatings of candy-cane-looking material instantly mummified them. They tipped over like statues.

Jimmy Shy had gotten a few splotches on him, but not enough to lock up his movements. Did he run, or did he wait for the stuff to stop spraying? Whoever was behind this was probably hoping he’d choose the second option. Still covering his face, Jimmy took off, only to hit a “candy patch” (whatever it was--and it obviously wasn’t actual candy--it was rock-hard and slick) and fell flat on his back. The place had become like an ice cave. In addition to the floor being lethally slippery, the walls and furniture were also covered, so he couldn’t steady himself on anything or pull himself up. Almost everything being red and white screwed up his depth-perception. While he was banging his elbows and knees trying to get to a standing position, the stuff finally stopped. That was when he heard the New Pornographers’ song “Miss Teen Wordpower”. In moments, it was accompanied by a weird rush of clicking coming from the next room.

His chihuahuas, each one foaming purple at the mouth, were dressed in little clown costumes. Some had bell-tipped jester caps, some had frills, and one wore Groucho glasses. Their well-trimmed paws tapped rhythmically on the candy-floor. They charged, their eyes drug-induced pinholes, while his bubbled over with vulnerability. The attack that ensued was largely comical, as neither party could get any traction on the icelike floor. At first, Jimmy Shy didn’t think he had it in him to defend himself, to hurt his precious babies--but after the third or fourth bite, he snapped a dog’s neck without even realizing it. He found himself spinning on his back, pushing and hitting and kicking his dogs, the room a nauseating blur set to the sound of the New Pornographers and rapid, momentum-heavy claw-scraping on the floor. Initially, he hoped that someone would look inside and call for help, but then he remembered that the windows had a subtly mirrorlike tint on the outside, for security reasons.

Jimmy Shy’s tormentor first appeared as a pair of black-and-white-checked shoes, equipped with long, metallic cleats. He saw the shoes in sideways-vision, given that he was still helplessly lying on the floor. A chorus of reflections blossomed on the shiny surface that had enveloped the room.

He managed to block out the actual deed, which, given the awkwardness of their setting, must have taken a good five or ten minutes. When he stopped zoning out, he found that he was covered in blood and surrounded by canine corpses. Jimmy started to sob. The Crime Clown sauntered up to him, knelt down, and smiled his funhouse-mirror teeth.

“Making people kill what they love the most? Never gets old,” the clown sighed happily. “But, we’re not quite done.”

He injected Jimmy Shy with a temporary paralyzing agent and set up a little digital video camera. After today, everyone would know that collaborating with Flask and his GYPD flunkies didn’t turn out well, and they’d also know that their city had just gotten a little more gloriously surreal. The Blue Wraith was going to be taking over Mr. Plastic’s operations (which Jimmy was providing evidence on), and he wanted them intact, instead of something he’d have to fix.

“The good news is, I’m gonna let you have a last meal. The bad news is, I’m gonna have to move your jaw to get you to chew. Here come the clown-doggies! Open wide for mommy!”

Despite the tracking microchip, Kirk Soren knew that he had a decent shot at escaping from the Blue Wraith’s control. For now, however, he was willing to stay in GMY, which was the perfect tableau (whether positively or negatively) for his work. He still hated it, but he had a good reason for not going anywhere. Kirk had achieved a new understanding of the world, and he wasn’t feeling bold enough to do anything about it, not quite yet. He’d come to realize that everyone is powered by a story. His own story involved a hopeless, lifeless man who resisted Fight Club-style nihilism and instead chose its distant cousin, absurdism. It was a tale of an incredible transformation. From that point on, his story had been strong enough to overcome virtually every obstacle in his path.

And then he’d met Peter Kral and Jeremy Carmichael, and the truth had hit him like a few dozen apocalypses at once: much like the old saying of “there’s always somebody tougher”, so too is there always someone with a better story. His had gone up against theirs, and it had been soundly defeated both times. It had, after all, been rooted in middle-class, middle America, middle everything normalcy. Whereas Carmichael’s birthright had either been robbed or squandered on an epic scale, and Kral was partially responsible for the death of ten thousand people and now had to deal with a nightmare of a city. The worst trauma Kirk had experienced involved polite sexual rejection and a meaningless life.

Kirk had made a classic error in judgment: he’d mistaken the most powerful thing that ever happened to him for the most powerful thing that ever could happen to anyone. He didn’t feel comfortable relying on his story to fuel him, not anymore. If dull reality could give birth to the legendary being he’d become, god only knew what sort of maniacs fantastic circumstances would churn out.

So, yes, Gothametropolis York wasn’t his kind of place. It was everything he opposed, stylistically-speaking. But, after finding out about the true scope of life, it was looking better all the time…