DVANDOM _____ ______ _____ _______ THE CENTURY PACT PART 5 of 12 [ ]__ [ ] [] [ ]__)) [ ] ` [ ]__ #77 - "Damnation" [ ] [ ] [] [ ] \\ [ ] [ ] copyright 1997 Dave Van Domelen [_] [_]__[] [_] \\ [_]___/ [_]____ -------]==+ <*> +==[------- [cover shows a demon's hand filling the entire scene, with flames licking about. On the hand lie the members of Dvandom Force, apparently dead. Cover copy says, "Divine Comedy Book I: Infer.net"] Squidman lay awake in bed, the clock on his nightstand proclaiming the time to be 2:32 AM. Sleep had not been coming easily these past few months. Not since Coppermane disappeared on his way to incarceration and the new Acton Lord made his bid for power. Things didn't fit anymore, and Squidman couldn't sleep until he could make them fit. Which meant he didn't get much sleep. Two old enemies coming back in new forms in two days, then nothing of note for two months. It didn't fit. Kid Pocky managing to defeat the new Acton Lord where the entire rest of the team had failed. The only explanation Kid Pocky could give was that perhaps the nature of Pocky was incorruptible. And Acton Lord's terrified near-catatonia could be the result of his sudden gain of power, but what if it had more to do with Kid Pocky than the young man was admitting to? It didn't fit. Political and popular opinion was slowly turning against net.heroes... from the occasional rally to entire nations turning against them. While much of it may be justified...the Alt.Riders certainly hadn't done much to endear themselves to the public in Germa.net, and their recent adventures in Phila.Delphi.com [yes, it's spelled differently in Alt.Riders. Just accept it as one of those Net.York City/New Yak City things and move along - Ed] hadn't done much to repair that image...well, okay, that did fit. Anti-hero sentiment came and went, it was just on a high cycle the past few months. What didn't fit was that new net.heroes seemed to be popping out of the woodwork all over the country *despite* the prejudice against them. A nagging voice at the back of Squidman's head told him the new heroes were all connected somehow, but in the past several weeks he'd been unable to find any link stronger than his hunches. It didn't fit. Especially when the hero-killers were factored in. A cyborg of some sort had been killing lesser-known net.heroes around the world, and was rumored to be a rogue agent of a shadowy and ill-defined extragovernmental law-enforcement agency of some sort. The new Acton Lord had a major mad-on for heroes. And there were others. Not enough to spur the LNH into action, but enough to worry Squidman. And so he lay awake. 2:33 AM. -------]==+ <*> +==[------- Net.Zealand was lovely this time of year. Of course, since it wasn't the real Net.Zealand, it was lovely any time of year that she wanted it to be. It was a dreamland, and Anna was its queen. Bisz...human dreamers... wandered contentedly across the landscape, acting out their dreams. If she wanted to, she could shift her perceptions to let her see the dreamland as the dreamer did, but she tried to avoid that these days. It was an invasion of privacy, and she'd paid the price for that sort of invasion in the past. So she contented herself with watching the patterns, entering a dream only if invited, and protecting her charges from outside invaders who would use the dreamlands as a stepping stone to some other goal. Looking out over the Biszes, she recognized the ones which corresponded to her various teammates. Her dreamlands were not the only place dreamers went when they slept, of course, but by long association with Anna, the other Dvandom Force members tended to end up in Net.Zealand more often than not these days. Ah, there was Squidman, finally drifting off to sleep. She had offered to help him, she'd learned ways to help induce peaceful sleep over the past year as a dreamqueen, but he always refused. He wanted to face his demons and doubts himself, and she could empathize. A shudder passed through the milling Bisz. Something was wrong. For the most part, they seemed contented enough, but.... Anna probed into the dreams of the nearest Bisz to see if there was an outside influence. And she fell.... -------]==+ <*> +==[------- Every dream had been a nightmare for Kat since she had become human. She had a lifetime and a half of horrible experiences to come filtering out of her subconscious when she drifted off to sleep, and even the few pleasant memories were so jumbled that they became a terrifying house of mirrors. At least, that's what she told herself. She couldn't quite trust Lynk enough to ask for help, so she just hoped it would pass on its own once she got over the newness of being human. For all she knew, just having to sleep and be totally unaware (and helpless to attackers!) was triggering subconscious fears in her. But this was somehow worse than her normal platter of night terror. At least those dreams tended to be familiar, somehow, a mixture of past experiences. She was pretty sure she'd remember having been entombed in ice. Not to mention, this was easily the most lucid dream she'd ever had. At first, she thought she'd waken up to this ice, but when she finally realized she should be suffocating, and wasn't, she knew it had to be a dream, right? The ice was so clear and cold, it was like being trapped in a kinetic damper field instead of in frozen water. Around her she could see others similarly trapped, although she couldn't see anything but straight ahead. Her eyes were frozen in her sockets. None of the others moved, they were frozen stiff like she was. And every one of them wore a mask of terror on his or her face. What did this mean? After a while, it started to get boring. Maybe everyone here had gone mad from boredom? Or from their own inner demons? Or maybe she was just reading too much into a very weird dream. Probably should ask Lynk about the meaning tomorrow. Wait. Movement in the distance. A glint of green metal moving as if the ice weren't there. Weaving between the other frozen forms and heading straight for Kat. Maybe her subconscious was getting ready to segue into another dream. It got closer, and now she KNEW it was another dream. It was Aurora. Her commanding officer in the Guardians. The RoboMAC who had been in charge of killing the human victims of the nanoplague. The RoboMAC she had killed [Kopikat Special #1 - Ed]. Never mind that he'd been rebuilt, only to go mad from his own obsessive fear of nanotech infection [Team M.E.C.H.A. #72]. Now, here he was, oddly scaled down to human size so he could look her straight in the face. "Somehow, I always knew you'd end up here, traitor. Traitor to your friends, traitor to your nation, traitor to your commanders, traitor to everyone you ever met," he smirked. Kat would have replied, "Where's here?" if she could have moved, and Aurora apparently anticipated her question. "You don't know where you are? Shame on you for not keeping up on your classics. You're in HELL, traitor. The very bottom of the lowest circle, where your kind of evil belongs. This is no dream, squishy...you're dead, and I'm here to be your personal tormentor!" -------]==+ <*> +==[------- A sharp pain in his stomach woke Sidewinder. He sleepily thought it might be a good idea to go get a snack, until he opened his eyes and saw his surroundings. Revelation one: This wasn't his bedroom in the Dvandom Force HQ. Among other things, his bedroom wasn't at the bottom of a chasm, and he was almost positive that there hadn't been winged demons with hooked tails flying around his room when he had gone to sleep. Revelation two: A snack wouldn't have helped, since it would have gone right through him. Literally. Sidewinder had been cut open and slit from neck to waist, opened up like a frog for dissection. But there was no blood. There weren't even internal organs! Conclusion: This really, really sucked. "Excuse me," he asked of a man walking by, head in his hands. The man lifted his head up and turned it to face Sidewinder. "Er, could you tell me what's going on here?" The whole situation was certainly odd enough to be a dream, but it couldn't hurt to ask around. The man said something in Italian, then walked on. Part of it sounded like "Mel Bolger," so the whole "it's a dream" hypothesis seemed justified. Certainly was a *painful* dream, though. "Just tell yourself, it's only a dream," he said, gritting his teeth. "No, it's not!" hissed Doctor Stomper, suddenly appearing on his left. "The demons, the Italians, the punishment...the only plausible explanation is that you, my former teammate, are in Hell." "What? What am I doing here? I'm one of the good guys!" Sidewinder protested. "You were, until you quit and went to join that other team," Rebel Yell hissed from the right. "You helped make a schism in the LNH, sowing discord within the team. Now you're dead, and in the proper place for such heretics." -------]==+ <*> +==[------- "I'm glad I could find the time to visit you again, Aunt Glory. It's been so long...well, I mean, since I could see you as Doug, not Alan, you know..." Doug stumbled. "Yes, I understand," Glory nodded, sipping her coffee. Doug shivered slightly. It was too cold. "Say, is there a draft around here that I missed last time I was over? It's awfully chilly." "Oh, no, I just pulled out all the insulation. I reminded me of you, and I couldn't have that around the house all the time." "WHAT? But, I thought you said you had gotten over Alan Berry, and that you were okay with my having had to keep my real identity secret from you?" Doug protested. "Oh, I had forgotten, but I never forgave you. You swept me off my feet, you idiot, then abandoned me for years, only to come back and break my heart all over again! You cold-hearted bastard, why did you have to let me pine for you for the best years of my life?" She stood, drink in hand, and stood menacingly over Doug, who suddenly felt like a ten-year-old again, being scolded by his aunt. "You could have left me a letter, you could have TRUSTED me not to tell your younger self...or maybe even TRUSTED me to decide for myself if it was worth sparing both of us years of torment, even if that meant changing the future! You thought you were being so selfless, staying on the rigid path the past told you your life had been, but I've never known someone to be so SELFISH in my entire life!" With that, she threw her drink in his lap, and it burst open, spreading ice over his body. As she stormed out, the house fell away entirely as the ice spread, filling Doug's vision to the horizon. He blinked, and when he opened his eyes, he was frozen up to his neck, a vast expanse of other heads poking up out of the ice around him. "What in the hell?" he spat. "Exactly! One side!" laughed a gravelly voice as the sound of ice skates hissed up behind him. "You betrayed your family, so you landed here in Hell!" said the demonic figure that skated up in front of his face. It was wearing a hockey uniform for some reason. "Is this Canadian Hell or something?" Doug asked. "Nah, we keeper devils just got bored listening to the moaning heads all day, so we formed leagues. H-E-double hockey sticks and all that, right? We find hockey's much more challenging with all the obstacles. Watch yer head!" it laughed evilly as it bounced a puck off his ear. "Ow! Why, you..." Doug said as he tried to vibrate free of the ice. Nothing happened. "Don't you get it?" asked a nearby head. "This is HELL. You have no powers, you're just another spirit trapped in the ice!" Doug closed his eyes. His powers had been a curse for most of his life. Often he'd thought that he'd give up a shot at Heaven just to be rid of his enhanced speed. Now he was without it, and he was trapped in a place they claimed was Hell. Terrific. -------]==+ <*> +==[------- There was one other reason Squidman usually didn't get much sleep, even when the pieces all fit. He dreamed. Usually the dreams were of having been dead [see Constellation #26-29 for the events around Squidman's death - Ed.], which was an experience he hadn't enjoyed and didn't want to repeat. His friend, Suicide Squid, may have had his stock in trade being death, but Squidman preferred to avoid it. Often he wondered how Cannon Fodder handled it...memories of one death were enough to ruin a good night's sleep for Squidman at least once a week, how could a man who died for a living ever sleep? Maybe it all got rather boring after a while, he supposed. But those weren't the only dreans he had which kept him from enjoying the little sleep he got. There was another dream that came once in a while. It came less often now than it once had, but it still intruded on his sleep every so often. He was standing on top of a skyscraper in downtown Sig.ago. Stan, the Cheeez Arrow, was next to him. Above them in the sky was the monstrous spider form of DeFacto V's gigantic battleRobo, the Black Widow, as it held Sig.Lad's armored body in its terrible talons. In seconds DeFacto would have the armor open, would flood Sig.Lad's body with nanotechnological invaders, turning Sig.Lad into a being of terrible power and single purpose: to destroy all who opposed him, turning the world into a sterile utopia. The past and future united in one moment. The Black Widow was the product of a century of warmachine science, impervious to everything they could throw at it. Every attack but one. The Atomic Cheeez Arrow. A weapon of last resort designed by Stan King's scientists, it contained cheeez molds so powerful they could eat through the bonds holding a nucleus together, triggering a small, focused atomic blast. It might cause DeFacto a moment's inconvenience under normal circumstances, but with the cosmic being known as Master Workload repairing every minor wound the Black Widow had suffered, even this weapon could do nothing against the future aspect of Sig.Lad. So, to save the future, Squidman took up the bow from Stan's trembling hands and fired the arrow at the present aspect of Sig.Lad, reducing him to free-floating vapors and forever preventing the future which DeFacto would have created. He killed his friend, his teammate. Always the dream ended with the searing heat of the fireball washing over Squidman's masked face, the flare of light momentarily blinding him, then he would wake up, sweating and short of breath. He woke up. Shivering, blind and unable to move to sit up. He felt himself encased in ice except for his face, and tried to open his eyes, which felt tear-crusted. But the tears had frozen, and he couldn't open his eyes. A coldness which had nothing to do with the ice gripped his heart. A memory from his college days at Berkeley rose, unbidden, to his thoughts. Dante's Divine Comedy. Book I: Inferno. Canto XXXIII. The traitors to hosts were condemned to an eternity of being frozen prone in the ice, their icy tears forming crusts over their eyes. Sig.Lad had, in his way, been a host. He invited a relatively obscure net.hero named Squid Boy into his little circle of net.heroes, the Secret Dvanders, which became the Dvandom Force. And, while his motives had been pure (had they?), Squidman had murdered his friend and leader. But he had been saving Sig.Lad from a fate worse than death (keep telling yourself that, maybe you'll believe it), not betraying him (suuure). Perhaps his dreams had found a new wrinkle. Maybe the window was open, which translated into the cold. And not being able to open one's eyes was a common feature of dreams just before awakening. But...somehow that explanation didn't fit. -------]==+ <*> +==[------- Being unconscious in a dream is one of those things that can give you a headache if you think about it for too long. Of course, if it happens to you, you can get the headache without having to bother thinking about it. Which pretty much sums up how Lynk felt. "Oooohhhh...what..." Lynk muttered as she staggered almost drunkenly to her feet. It took her a moment to realize something was quite wrong. "My head. Is on. Backwards," she said aloud to no one in particular, in the same tone of voice one would use to say, "You invented microwavable Haggis." Not exactly disbelief, but a sort of "okay, but why?" tone. Then she noticed that she was surrounded by other figures who had backwards heads as well. Looking up (a neat trick, considering the circumstances) she spotted demons of some sort at the top of the crevice she was in. "Right," she said aloud as she grabbed her head in both hands and twisted it back around with a horrible crunching sound. "When I find you, mister dream-invader, I think I'll stick you in a hole and set your feet on fire like the guys in that crevice over there. Now, where's the best place to climb up...?" -------]==+ <*> +==[------- "What's the matter? Kat got your tongue?" Aurora taunted. "Oh, sorry, I know my sense of humor isn't very good. After all, I'm only a MAC, an 'artificial' mind, not one of your vaunted squishy thinkers. You really should have stuck to doing squishy things, girl...would have saved you a LOT of grief." Aurora moved around behind Kat, where she couldn't see him, and started running his cold metal hands through her hair. The ice wasn't stopping him. "You should have stayed out of things that didn't concern you, girl! Like fighting MACE! You could have had a comfortable life, making babies and pursuing some artistic career, doing the things we MACs can't do, but NOOOO. You had to try and play the hero, prove that squishies could do anything RoboMACs could do. Did you know that, before you got Scanned, we would talk about you behind your back? The poor little human who thought she could outfight a MACE Warmachine. First it was your ludicrous imitation of a Robo, then that clever little control device. What did it get you? PAIN. They should have left you to die, girl...it was a mistake to put someone as stupid as you into a Robo body where you could do some real harm. And by the source code, did you do some real harm! You became a legend, synonymous with traitorous mercenary greed...you even outdid your earlier notoriety, girl. And for what? So you could betray everyone you ever met and end up here in Hell, for an eternity alone with your regrets. "You never should have tried to play the hero, little girl." -------]==+ <*> +==[------- "Ow!" Doug shouted as the hockey puck bounced off his face. "The goalpost is instructed to remain quiet!" boomed a voice from overhead, just out of Doug's view. "Hey, new kid, I explained it to you," sneered a demon in goalie pads. "New arrivals get to be goalposts for the first eternity. What do you expect to get when you betray family...tickets to Jamaica?" "But..." Doug started. "But nothing, hockey puck. Y'know, this is all the fault of your stupid hero-worship, you know? Yeah, that's right. If you hadn't been so infatuated with net.heroes, if you'd stuck to normal kid things like baseball and biking and shaking down smaller kids for lunch money, you never woulda gotten saddled with that artificial nervous system, slung through time, and put in the position to betray your loving...heh...aunt." The goalie paused to block a shot, shoving his skate into Doug's chin. "Yeow!" "You never shoulda wanted to play the hero, kid." -------]==+ <*> +==[------- Doctor Stomper poked at Sidewinder's exposed inside. "Look, he doesn't even have internal organs. He's completely homogenous." "It's because he has no GUTS," sneered Rebel Yell. "Never has. Had to run away to get attention." "I theorize it is because, for all his time on screen, Sidewinder has never actually developed past the outer shell," Stomper countered. "There's nothing inside him because no one ever thought to put anything there. All he needed as a hard candy shell to keep him from melting in your hands." "Um, guys, are you going to save me or something?" Sidewinder asked, hopefully. It was a fading hope, though...somehow he couldn't picture either Rebel Yell or Doc Stomper acting like this. Right? Rebel Yell laughed bitterly. "Why would we do that? YOU wanted nothing to do with the LNH, YOU left, so we're giving you your wish. Leaving you alone. Of course, alone you're nothing, so I don't see why you even want to be saved. You have nothing to go back to." "I hypothesize that Sidewinder is so extensively a non-entity that it was a mistake for him to join the LNH in the first place," Doc Stomper noted. "Yeah!" Rebel Yell agreed. "A loser power and nothing to back it up with...what was he thinking? All it got him was time in a cell while Acton Lord experimented on him, then a whole lot of pain...if someone as non-existent as him really feels pain...until he got cured. He shoulda become an accountant." "Chartered," Stomper added. "Face it, buddy, you never shoulda become a net.hero." -------]==+ <*> +==[------- Squidman heard someone walking across the ice nearby. Whoever it was, he stopped next to Squidman and sat down. "So, run out of friends to kill, or did one of them kill you?" Sig.Lad's voice asked. Squidman would have jerked back in surprise had he been able to move in his tomb of ice. "Sig.Lad?" "Enjoying your just desserts? I just had to come down and see for myself that you were paying for what you did," the voice replied with a false tone of pleasantry. "Can I get you anything? A cold drink?" he laughed, but was met with silence from Squidman. "Aw, you're just no fun anymore. I guess all this ice has something to do with that, eh?" Squidman felt a cold breath on his face as the voice got closer. "Your first mistake was in becoming a net.hero, you realize. You were just some college kid, you should have stayed far away from net.hero business and stayed happy. But NOOOO, you had to get involved, had to play the hero. And look where it got you. Killed more than once, turned into murdering scum, suffering nothing but pain for your efforts. "Face it, man, you should never have become a net.hero." Squidman paused for a long moment. This couldn't be real...things just didn't fit. But it was too lucid, too involved to be a normal dream. Things. Didn't. Fit. Then, in a moment of clarity, they did. Squidman's arms tore free of their icy prison and lashed out to grab the neck of whatever was in front of him. His eyes flew open, to see Sig.Lad's face on the body of a serpent, and he brought up his legs to kick the thing away just before it could strike at him with its scorpion's tail stinger. "Geryon, demon of insincerity and duplicity," Squidman said with an even tone, standing and dropping into a fighting stance. "You're out of your circle, demon, you should be up above Malebolgia, if I remember my Dante correctly. I'd ask what this all is, but I doubt you'd tell me the truth. Besides, I think I know. It's a dream, isn't it? Someone's controlling my dreams, trying to play on my guilt?" Geryon just hissed and circled Squidman. -------]==+ <*> +==[------- Kid Pocky awoke on a sandy beach. Looking up, he could see stars in the lightening sky of dawn, and Venus shining unblinkingly above. Standing up, he was struck by the similarity of his location to Andale Atoll, and wondered how he had gotten there. For some reason, he wasn't gripped by panic at the thought of having moved across the world in his sleep, and he wondered why. Then he turned about and saw something that Andale Atoll certainly didn't have. A huge, terraced mountain rising into the vault of heaven itself. Where was he? "Ahem," came a voice from near his feet. Looking down he saw a strange feathered creature, like a cross between an owl and a chicken. "I'm not a chicken, I'm a fowl," the creature corrected him, apparently having read his thoughts. "Who are you?" Kid Pocky asked. "And what do I want?" it smirked. "I'm sure you don't recognize me like this...I hardly recognized myself when I emerged from my own dream into this setting. I'm your teammate, the VAXX. To answer the other questions you probably have, in order: "One, this is a dream, but only in a general sense. Someone has taken control of the dreams of everyone in the Midwest, for purposes I do not yet know...omniscience has its limits. Events which transpire here will be remembered clearly when you awake. If you awake. Dreams tonight may very well be fatal for some. "Two, our friends are in a dream version of Hell, out of Dante's Infer.net. In fact, every net.hero in the affected area is in Hell, as far as I can tell. "And three, as to why you're not in Hell with the others? I'm not completely sure. This, after all, is an interpretation of Purgatory, a place of redemption. Perhaps it is your strong need for redemption, a redemption you craved from the Source Code itself, which has brought you here. At least, this seems reasonable, doesn't it, Acton Lord?" "You...know?" ========================================================================== NEXT ISSUE: Demons are fought, redemption is sought, but is it for naught? ========================================================================== Author's Notes: Heh heh heh....