Yep, hit Security Level 50 tonight with some folks I know on Triumph. If we have any problems now, we can call in the "Big Guns". It was a wicked fun ride with Ater and he's a champ at soloing and large teams. To be honest though, I'm a little disappointed, as there's not a lot more for him to do other than "go out and have fun", which is fine. Anyway, thought I'd let you guys know.
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Sunday, December 30, 2007
Ater Custos hits 50!
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Speaking of Cadavers: The Origin of Cadabra
Speaking Of Cadavers
“Rent controlled” were the only two words he needed to hear. Sandusky was to become a relic of his past while Paragon City a foothold to the future. An era had begun. It wasn’t that Sandusky didn’t have its charm, but a young man can only take dates to The Rutherford B. Hayes Library and Presidential Center so many times before his limited romantic creativity would show through. Paragon promised performance artists and chocolate baguettes and booze cruises and the never-ending chance to be an accidental extra in the latest Scorsese film. The decision was anything but tough, wartime or no.
At twenty-six years of age, Gus Faustian had only made it as far as Cleveland, round trip, and for that he took his passport, just in case. Now, his grandmother was going into a home and her apartment in The Gish was available at 1954 prices. The excitement of the prospect fell only a hair short of overpowering Gus’ concern for Grammy Weist. Her health was okay for the most part, but she’d come to the states fresh off the boat from Turkey and still had a hard time with complex English sentences. Gus wondered how she would get along when questions about meds and therapies would arise. All the better reason to be close to her.
Most of Gus’ belongings fit into five boxes square, leaving as much room in the trunk of his ’85 Datsun. In true bachelor style he drove hundreds of miles bereft of pots, plates, utensils, vacuum, cash, map, dress shoes or clean underwear. His boxes instead contained little more than random hobbyist trinkets; two Harry Potter books, Clive Barker’s Imajica on DVD, his GenCon busting red deck replete with goblin skirmishers, a couple D&D tomes with dog-eared corners on pages about druids, his Terry Pratchett collection, a poster of Rivendell, the cassette soundtrack to Xanadu, a ceramic Disney Pinocchio, and a framed certificate from the International Poets’ Society for his award winning piece on tiromancy. It wasn’t until all his prized possessions were collected together in one place that Gus noticed a theme to his likes.
Grammy Weist’s place was sort of an oasis. Similar to other residences in The Gish, from the outside one could still see the unmistakable traits of an old meat packing plant once converted into overpriced condos. Now those condos were illegitimate workfare apartments containing city dwellers otherwise mimicking the social decay of greater Kings Row. A simple, uninformed walk to the train could cost a thrill-seeker his life. Yet, on the inside, Grammy’s place looked like something out of a roaring Deco magazine spread, immaculate, tasteful, and high-end in every regard. Ornate white trim bordered every floorboard and doorway bubbling up hand-carved, non-repeating reliefs shaped like flower clusters and winding vines. The mock copper ceiling was stamped out in countless squares each of which encapsulated simple geometric shapes, complimentary to the next square by forty-five degrees, the whole plate covered in a low-gloss, white enamel that spread broken light from each room’s differing chandelier over the bumps in the pattern. There were wall sconces that looked to be burgled from the Chrysler Building, beveled chair rails and imported wainscoting that would make Martha Stewart weep, and even the added bonus of a wrought iron spiral staircase that ascended to a second level. A sitting room and a den each contained Vermont marble fireplaces further warming the vaguely gold interior along with dark red throw rugs and deep cherry wood furniture. Gus had never seen an actual settee or a sideboard until now. The same could be said about the very tall, pull-chain toilet in the bathroom whose tank was about two inches from the ceiling. Foyer, library, dining room, standing wet bar, roll top desk, vaulted archways, solid silver trays and tea settings, fine china in a massive Americana hutch stationed strategically distant from the grand piano across the apartment in the salon, it was as if Gus had stepped into a different dimension. Every classic item in the place had been positioned to draw one’s eye to the next. This wasn’t just an apartment. It had lines, class, and a soupcon of understated glamour. Homier than a museum with delicate design and decorative technique falling mere notches short of clutter, to Gus such a fragile and well-kempt environment could only mean one thing…PARTY!
All the nearby power lines made cell phone reception on Grammy’s street a joke. After checking in on her and the case workers at the assisted living facility, Gus spent the day riding the rail and ringing up every number in his full SIM card. Sure, Sandusky was days away, but for a place this nice and this large at this price to suddenly open up to the hard core party circuit, people would hitch if they had to. Gus would have called it a house warming, but house beering seemed the more accurate notion.
Three nights later the rave was in full swing. Of course, one’s network of like-minded friends when that one travels on the Xanadu soundtrack, more for ONJ than ELO, meant that by “rave” they were really talking about a soiree barely two degrees of separation from an alcoholic spelling bee. It was a night of mixed and low-market Canadian ales and Buds, bottled, not canned. The evening’s conversations, as inebriated ones tend to do, spanned subjects as egghead haut as quantum physics to others as base as the theory of orifices. In place of the tokeables and decent acid your average biker might find at a get-together, Gus’ gathering had at least ten homespun games that required Scrabble tiles, a lightning-round-only Pictionary station and a bughouse version of backgammon being run tournament style in the salon. Impromptu karaoke quartets broke out randomly while competitive attempts to slide the helix railing on the staircase became the night’s greatest challenge. The scene, as was, barley warranted mentioning that the party was devoid of female presence.
A wise-ass man once said that a good buzz is the sudden, jarring awareness that time cannot be measured in seconds or minutes. Long about the part of the evening when the average blood-alcohol content was .23, Gus was way beyond the bell curve. He’d been striking creatively lewd positions on the chaise lounge for high res’ digital posterity when a loud crash came from the upper level. Gus’ reaction was first delayed by the secret Heineken flowing through his veins and then further pushed off by the strung out realization that he had no idea what anything in this apartment cost. Thereafter, he darted up the spiral staircase, though to any onlooker he more meandered over and around invisible groundhogs than he did dart. The top of the spiral let out into the library, a somewhat dark and still chamber, replete with first edition texts and a décor that made even health nuts want to throw on a dressing gown and smoke a big pipe. Three cronies had made their way up around the monstrous oak desk in the library to debate the Dewey Decimal system and to joke about having murdered a fictional butler, Clue-style, a butler whom at least two of them were sure was a monkey. With the bleary-eyed homicide reenactment had come a few too obvious footprints on the desk blotter and the punch drunk “discovery” of a slide away panel in the ceiling. The panel had been punctured by a less than pointy head, crumbling to the ground in pieces and allowing nested stair sections to roll out in a horrendous series of thumps.
Gus tried to muster a clear string of verbal outrage to befit the sight, but took pause given the beer gas bubble seemingly crammed halfway up his chest, mid-belch. Frakes was in a leather armchair laughing hysterically at the irony while William, Sandusky’s Beavis quotes champion, attempted to mitigate. William explained in sentence fragments, each beginning and ending in “dude,” all about the butler monkey and his perilous demise at the hands of brown bottle fiction. Frakes, having finished a seemingly endless guffaw, then interrupted and rolled back in time a single subject to instead explain how they were previously debating etymology, a dangerous, room-wrecking subject by all counts. Gus tried to be responsible, but a few angry steps toward the trio layered adrenaline onto his altered state, again failing to form any actually audible sentence, but succeeding in a mysterious gimp. Meanwhile, Arnold Radich, of fly unzipped fame, jumped back several lines of dialogue in an apparent attempt to make everything okay by explaining from the inebriated beginning.
Arnold had begun with how this library reminded him of his 4th grade library which was all Dewey Decimal and newly offered that Frakes was a Library of Congress man, himself. There had thusly been a lengthy pretzel stick sword fight over said schism before the conversation turned to Admiral Dewey and thereafter to all things named after other things, quite the think tank agenda. Somewhere beyond Martin Luther King Boulevard, all the ships named Enterprise, a random kid named August, Muppets coming from puppets, oranges, Swiss cheese, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, New Jersey, and a near kick boxing match over the fact that everybody had claimed a different word origin for abracadabra, they had soon decided to ask the butler. After all, any such Clue-looking room should have a butler and anybody rich enough to have a butler could afford a monkey. A court stenographer’s head would have imploded.
Having heard Arnold out, Gus realized that a good scolding and the filament of logic he’d be able to graft onto his dismay just weren’t going to play to this audience. His attention instead turned to the unfurled staircase. Gus approached it with wonder. He didn’t know there was an attic. Who had ever heard of an apartment with an attic? Plus, if this had been a meat packing plant, what unsightly atrocities would have been dismal enough to need an attic? The ravers, realizing that they were probably off the hook, under the auspices of Arnold’s liquored reminder, bounced back into the abracadabra debate. William re-upped his claim that it was from the Hebrew, ha-brachah, meaning “The Curse.” Arnold pointed to Aleister Crowley as the originator while Frakes gave a list of possibilities, two of which included lines from Bewitched reruns, original Darren notwithstanding. Gus barely slowed down as he fit his more certain two cents in.
“No, it’s from Turkish, and the Turks take it from Aramaic. Avra kedavra, ‘What I speak is destroyed.’ Even Latin takes its word for corpse from kedavra.”
The library went silent. Real partiers aren’t accustomed to a sudden serious tone or an argument that makes even mediocre sense, especially when that sense comes from the drunkest one of them all. Now the attic stairs and Gus’ ascent were center stage. Gus peeped his head and eyes just above the rim of the opening, his footsteps creaking the whole way. It was dark, very dark, the kind of dark that swallows up light hungrily. The space inside might have once been larger, given the full, interlocking stair sections that had telescoped into a standard flight, but was now penned up into a single, cramped room the size of a modest, walk-in closet. Each corner was within Gus’ arm’s reach and he hadn’t even attempted to pass the fourth step from the top. He’d expected insulation and beams, wood with an exposed galvanized nail head or two, but the room echoed like stone and smelled more like the hollow innards of a mossy stump. As Gus smoothed his full arm length over the floor of the room, it felt clean, surprisingly clean. There was no dust or grit rolling around, not a mouse dropping or stray splinter. Doing the same with his opposite arm drew out a similar pristine slice in the pitch when it, almost startlingly so, touched something. Gus grabbed and drew his elbow back into the library light to reveal a full folio sized book.
The text looked more than ancient, it looked other-worldly. The characters would fade onto and off of the page, sink into the browned creases and rise again as if floating through mud. On the taut, leather spine, calligraphic scrawl, barely legible, scrabbling out only a few cryptic words. The first atop, a conundrum, the word Grenoble. And if that didn’t sound foreign enough, beneath it was twisting the more mysterious word, Felucca.
Of course, most of the dancing glyphs could be explained by the fact that during the last few hours, Gus shared more in common with a pile of hops than he did with any human smart enough to read. Given that and the rather anticlimactic emergence of a book from the secret room into a library otherwise filled with books when guests would have preferred a mummified pigmy or a treasure map to Hallie Berry’s underwear drawer, the find got shelved in the starker reference section for Gus to revisit later. The party lasted two more days.
The following Friday, Gus had reached that triumphant moment when the last beer bottle makes it into the recycle bin. He would have had the cleaning done sooner, but three day party equals two day hangover, both of which he’d spent visiting his grandmother. Today would be his first chance to look in the paper for a job. Gus grabbed the Paragon Times from the floor in the hallway, brought it to the breakfast table where he’d set out cold pizza and grapefruit juice, and began perusing every other slot between the endless gal Friday ads. His eyes settled upon one opening for a grill man at the Green Gables Café when somehow the shape of those letters reminded him of the old attic book from five nights prior. Beer had then quelled any semblance of curiosity, but midway through a semi-stale bite of his double chicken and onion slice, the question mark hanging over his head was too much to live with. Gus ran to the library.
Today, while faded and vague, the letters seemed to move around far less. In truth, they didn’t move as much as they did morph in form. Gus blamed his astigmatism and the fact that he’d left his glasses in Sandusky, but even so, that didn’t explain what looked like Cyrillic letters shifting into Egyptian hieroglyphics and then into alephs, kalephs, and spotty daggesh fortes. For a moment, he swore he saw a Greek delta just before it changed to both Roman numerals and what an eighth grade trip to a reservation allowed him to remember were Cherokee notations. Gus actually spent some time musing over whether or not this was angelic script before the forms became more recognizable. English, it had hit and stuck on plain English, every page.
The book read now as a chronicle, the chronicle of two personages named Grenoble and Nacht who’d ventured through a land called Felucca replete with dark magic and monsters. The story spoke of a great black pearl shortage that saw man and beast traveling to the far corner’s of unknown realms, and Felucca seemed to be the riskiest among them. While Gus didn’t understand a great deal of the entries, several spoke of something called a Moongate, which, as best as Gus could ascertain, was a portal to another dimension. It was the only means of entering Felucca and frighteningly, one of the only ways back. Many of the entries were fully chronicled while others were obviously interrupted quite suddenly, further indicating the danger of a Fellucan pilgrimage.
Gus poured over the text for an entire day. There was just something captivating about it, something documentarian about the manner in which magic was described, Ultimata, the author called it. Grenoble, the writer, in amidst the many entries about Nacht coming to his rescue, took tangential time to describe spells and the origins of magic. Most didn’t make sense, much in the way Harry Potter fiction was a free-for-all of amateurish continuity. Yet, throughout the read Gus came out feeling empowered. He was not only absorbed by the passages, but felt as if he’d been gleaning some richness from the words. Barely aware of how much he was skimming, he still came out at the end of each canto feeling the accomplishment of memorization and the pride of a job well done. It was weird.
While most of the spell sections lacked common sense, canto thirty-three was of particular note. It included a description and illustration of a Moongate. Gus realized he had seen something very similar before. The pictures in the paper of Rikti portals looked quite like the Moongate illustration, somewhat round for the sake of balanced energies, but stretched so that hominids might walk through erect. Gus’ eyes dead stopped on this page. He felt rushes of concern and wonder as his blood pulsed boomingly. He momentarily thought this was somehow a hidden solution to the Rikti conflict before allowing sharper thought to drive the train. Surely Rikti portals were in some way technology based. What if this was an instruction booklet to an alternative? What if this book could magically create portals that would allow the U.S. Marines to beam into the war zone and thieve the element of surprise? Rikti advantage over non-supers would be completely eclipsed. Gus had found newer purpose and allowed the waves of endless possibility to roll over him as he studied the entry.
Grammy Weist had made it seventeen weekly bingo sessions before the boredom of suburban golden years took shape. She’d begun insisting that Gus come twice a day as opposed to his normal singular visit. Gus, of course, readily obliged despite his double shifts at Pizza Hut and full nights spent mulling over the Moongate passages. While the treasured visits slowed Gus’ progress in understanding the entry, the truth was he’d been about as successful as a level three gravity controller trying to take on a Peregrine Island Warhulk. English text or no, The Chronicles of Grenoble and Nacht in Felucca left him baffled. It wasn’t as if black pearls and sulfur were lying around the parking lot of the Galaxy City Blockbuster and these were ingredients the alleged Master Mage, Grenoble, had strewn across several pages. Gus had tried to improvise with Circle of Thorns salvage purchased at bargain basement prices from the black market, but to no avail. Moongates, portals, whatever the canto was trying to document, it seemed an exercise in academics only.
Come the first Saturday of double visits to the home, Gus had run out of new things to tell his grandmother. The Hut had no new toppings. Employee of the month was going to have to wait again. The Datsun had become uninteresting conversation two decades prior. He was somewhat doomed to listen to the tales of Ruby and Tallulah, Grammy Weist’s sesqugeneric suitemates. His quality time torture began about six p.m. and visiting hours weren’t over ‘til ten. The conversation started with a story about getting her first set of dishes for free, one at a time, from the Rialto movie theatre watching serials on the silver screen. The next time Gus feigned workable consciousness, the story had moved on to the evils of standard airbags and flame retardant pajamas. An epoch later, Grammy was on to the muscular boatswain’s mate, Bill Haden she’d met on her trans-Atlantic voyage, a man who’d last vied for her affections before she met and fell in love with Gus’ grandfather, Wilbert, at Ellis Island. Fifteen minutes remained before the nurses would kick him out for the night.
Grammy finished on a new track before the evening drew shut. Much out of character for herself, she’d started in on questions to Gus that took him off guard. His mind still pondered the Moongate conundrum, but his face was the perfect poker shape to con Grammy into receiving it as full attention. She asked how he liked Paragon and the apartment. She asked if he’d been dating anyone special and a few less than noteworthy inquiries about Gus’ preferred type. She even briefly took one accidental segue out into the conversational realm of radio shows and Inner Sanctum, before bringing her focus back to her grandson’s distractions. Short only two minutes to lights out, Grammy Weist hit with a stumper that Gus translated as,
“Gussy, I can tell you’re preoccupied. You really should tell me what’s wrong so I can work a grandmother’s magic.”
Gus had no idea how to sum up weeks of decrypting a completely foreign and near nonsense text in a two minute schpiel. For that matter, he didn’t know whether it was something he’d be willing to reveal to his grandmother at all, what with the gaping hole in her ceiling. It was just easier to skirt the issue, and adding guilt onto guilt, that’s just what Gus did.
“Grammy, I’m just worried about how to take care of your place properly. You’ve got such great stuff. It’s nothing really.”
Grammy Weist sensed the deflection, but as sharp grandmothers do, she rolled with what was made available. Gus continued to listen through her thick accent, still hearing her meaning more than her sounds.
“Well, Gussy, it’s simple really. A place for everything and everything in its place.”
Gus gave only one kiss and one hug before running to catch the yellow line.
2 a.m. and sick of all pizza permutations, Gus tried to keep Ben & Jerry’s drippings from splattering the Moongate diagram. All around him at the table were Paragon Times archives, on loan, describing Rikti portals, plus a few too many dictionaries of the Occult. At that point Gus had even resorted to treating D&D accessories as source materials. Logic was a long way off. Frustration was more familiar to him than excitement. All other concerns were not so much as a blip on the radar. Failure was ever-present. About to fall asleep in the chair, Grammy’s advice shone through the mental mess. “A place for everything, and everything in its place!” It was as if the shape of those very words formed a skeleton key that would unlock margins and reveal the pith of the mysterious Chronicle. There was something in that passing pleasantry that simply felt as the missing piece of a puzzle, the last brick in a wall. All his research and numbing attempts at clarity had hopped over one important detail. He never used the book in the attic space.
Carrying the folio two handed, he lumbered hurriedly up both the spiral and extended staircases. He needed no light, as by this time all his Moongate attempts were memorized times over. The attic was still dark and the makeshift apprentice lurched into the blinding pitch surer than ever. Gus placed his hand on the book and intoned a litany of presumed incantations, front to back and back to front. Nothing. He mustered his best guesses at Latin pronunciation and Greek inflection. Still nothing. Confident, Gus looped words piecemeal from different incantations into almost nonsense strings of gibberish. Come 4 a.m., the attic remained a dark, motionless room. Gus slumped into the blackest corner, again dismayed. Odds were, by now, that if there were any reality to this book, he’d have randomly stumbled across a working conjuration by now. Monkeys would be writing Hamlet first, at this rate. He let out a sigh of defeat and almost jokingly quipped aloud, “Abracadabra?”
Gus didn’t know if it was the plain word, or the word spotted on the end of his long verbal mantra like punctuation, but the ensuing quake didn’t give much time dwell on the question. Painted china rumbled in place throughout the apartment as raw power was pulled in electric slivers from every junction box in a one block radius, piercing the attic walls and dancing in space. The chandeliers could be heard rocking in rooms far off and dusty pebbles of brick and mortar violently shook from the building in a pattern that sounded like sudden rain. Shadows ripped up from floors and swirled upward into the boxy room like dark dust devils filled with smoke. Carpets cringed on the floor as the whole structure shifted slightly with a loud crack that was heard for miles around. Gus had to fight the impetus to jump down the stairs and run clear back to Sandusky. And then, an illuminated split in the very air before him blazed fourth in an orangish glow. It had finally worked.
The split was not as round as he’d expected. Surely, Gus had done something wrong. The portal, if that’s what it was, looked more squarish and awkward. The light it emitted looked to be attempting linear shapes, but burped up random bubbles and dark patches that made it read as uneven and in some ways broken. The fibers on Gus’ sweater pulled toward the opening and his hair yanked forward. The air around him whooshed by as it to got sucked into the opening, carrying with it every speck of dust and every remnant of pizza odor left in the home. The sheering drag summoned him closer, pulling at his sneakers’ grip on the floor, underscoring the idea that if this wasn’t a portal, it was indeed some kind of pure vortex. There seemed only one way to find out.
Gus stood. He reassured himself that Grammy would be fine and that an event like this would be nothing in comparison the triumph of trying it out. He had no idea where the shaky portal might lead. If a Moongate, perhaps he too was off to Felucca. If not that, perhaps the Rikti home world where certain death would await. Whatever the cost, the prospect was too attractive to refuse. Gus readied his stance, opting to jump headlong rather than step, and took a moment only to pray. Wind rushing, dust blasting his eyes, Gus’ prayer was just about through when his concentration, dulled as it was, got interrupted by a series of audible beeps.
It was his cell phone. He thought of ignoring it, in fact, he thought hard on that more than once. Yet, it wasn’t a call. His ring tone was set and stuck on the unenviable stylings of Rick James’ Superfreak. This beeping was different, and a vibrant curiosity in the cell phone signal abyss that was King’s Row. Even at that, the undulating faux gold light just one step away should have been enough to ignore the cell, but let’s face it. Cell phones just need to be answered.
Gus yanked the contraption from his pocket and flipped it open in one smooth motion. He cocked his wrist toward the light of the magic portal as if to see better. Loose papers flashed up from the apartment below and got swallowed in the light. Gus leaned back from the urgent pull. The cell phone signal, five bars strong, clearly came from the pillar of light. A few savvy thumb gestures letter, Gus had revealed a bizarre text message. The sender identified himself only as Mantlet. The title of the message came through in all caps as WARNING! Gusts growing, thumbs dancing, Gus responded.
The warning spoke of a band of Super Heroes that called themselves Apotheosis and the danger they tried to fight via something called Ouroboros. The text was a bit fractured and hackneyed, but one thing was certain, Gus had never heard of any hero named Mantlet. Level 50 heroes were in the paper everyday and it was hard for a commoner to escape their notoriety. Though this Mantlet claimed to be from Paragon City, Gus was sure that he was either a trickster or from someplace altogether different. Gus’ return texts scoffed at the sender’s claims and only barley served to push a dialogue forward. Winds swirling around him, it was all Gus could do to analog back, engrossed just as much in the increasing pull of the light as in the mysterious texts from the “other side.” Only the word, WARNING had stayed his feet with reason.
This Mantlet claimed a goodly number of questionable truths. He was supposedly hold up in some secret Apotheosis lair, typing away at a workstation while conducting experiments. He stated that he’d acquired the ability to slapdash together a Rikti portal device from salvage and wildly made the additional claim of being able to time travel with yet another device. His hypothesis, as incomprehensive as it seemed, revolved around opening a time travel portal inside a Rikti portal, and the fear that it could lead to a result he called “paradimensional,” a wartime front for which the U.S. was not ready. He conducted experiments in secret in hopes of relaying warnings to heroes in the honeycomb of polydimensia, rallying them to a cause of a unified Paragon offense. To date, this one signal was the only he could establish. It was all a little too much for Gus to digest, but he couldn’t deny that it was happening. The bottom of the staircase began to lift a little from the floor. The desk blotter had flown up and just missed Gus’ head before getting engulfed. The instability around him was growing, strongly, and now he was faced with trumping these potentially bogus and time-eating texts by signaling back that he was just a man, not a super hero. With said message went explanations as to the book, the portal, Gus’ intent to enter, and what was certainly building to an explosion of some sort if this Mantlet didn’t leave well enough alone.
Mantlet worked fast. Short texts came in reading only, “No!” and “Wait!” and a quick “Please!” Gus humored them, despite the fact that the oak desk in the library had just shifted. He could hear glass breaking and what sounded like faint pig squeals twisting through the wind. The ceiling began to vibrate. Gus’ skin started to ripple over his muscles. Whatever this Mantlet character was going to do, he had about ten seconds to do it or Gus was going to take his chances stepping through and talking face to face.
Gus was wrong about those ten seconds. In only two, the blast of light slapped closed with a horrendous snap and threw him, bodily, back down into the library, crashing over everything in his path. All the moisture spinning through the air condensed into tiny bits of sleet and dropped on him as if thrown from a bucket. Papers slowed from the breeze and again sought out the assuredness of gravity. Grammy’s place rang its way to eventual quiet again like the after-tone of striking a piano key or tuning fork. Gus sat up in the stillness, nose bloodied, forehead cut in more than one place. About six feet from him was the folio, the whole Chronicle perceivably intact. Gus smiled a bit as he reached for the cuts on his head, sucking blood back with a sniff. At the very least, with the book, he could try again, perhaps with better results. Today though, it looked like he was more meant for Band-Aids, a hot bath, and another two-day round of cleaning Grammy’s apartment. Gus tilted his head back, managed a more relaxed sit, and squeezed his nose shut, grabbing a blank tax form to be used as a tissue. Success was success, no matter what the outcome.
The silence seemed almost unbearable now. It sat and sat and asked nothing of itself but to sit some more. It settled in on Gus to the point where he could hear himself bleed. It was a long quiet stretched over thin air and sudden calm. Nonetheless, silence is only contained in moments, waiting out the next heartbeat or footstep to witness its own destruction. In this case, it gave way to a familiar beep. Gus brushed aside the pile of light trinkets that had come to rest to his left and grabbed his cell phone. It beckoned even as he lifted it. He checked for new text, uncertain as to whether there’d been enough time to zap through any message of gravitas. There was one, new entry. It offered no text in the body, only an attachment. This mysterious Mantlet must have been at the ready to download it at a moment’s notice. That said something about both him and the contents. The “To” field read only “Triumph,” the “From” field, “Freedom,” apparent codenames both. It wasn’t until Gus had fully fiddled with his menu to open the attachment that he realized what it was. He had to scroll to get the full length of the entire title on screen, but there was no mistaking what it said.
The Complete and Unedited Instructions on Becoming a Magic Super Hero
“Rent controlled” were the only two words he needed to hear. Sandusky was to become a relic of his past while Paragon City a foothold to the future. An era had begun. It wasn’t that Sandusky didn’t have its charm, but a young man can only take dates to The Rutherford B. Hayes Library and Presidential Center so many times before his limited romantic creativity would show through. Paragon promised performance artists and chocolate baguettes and booze cruises and the never-ending chance to be an accidental extra in the latest Scorsese film. The decision was anything but tough, wartime or no.
At twenty-six years of age, Gus Faustian had only made it as far as Cleveland, round trip, and for that he took his passport, just in case. Now, his grandmother was going into a home and her apartment in The Gish was available at 1954 prices. The excitement of the prospect fell only a hair short of overpowering Gus’ concern for Grammy Weist. Her health was okay for the most part, but she’d come to the states fresh off the boat from Turkey and still had a hard time with complex English sentences. Gus wondered how she would get along when questions about meds and therapies would arise. All the better reason to be close to her.
Most of Gus’ belongings fit into five boxes square, leaving as much room in the trunk of his ’85 Datsun. In true bachelor style he drove hundreds of miles bereft of pots, plates, utensils, vacuum, cash, map, dress shoes or clean underwear. His boxes instead contained little more than random hobbyist trinkets; two Harry Potter books, Clive Barker’s Imajica on DVD, his GenCon busting red deck replete with goblin skirmishers, a couple D&D tomes with dog-eared corners on pages about druids, his Terry Pratchett collection, a poster of Rivendell, the cassette soundtrack to Xanadu, a ceramic Disney Pinocchio, and a framed certificate from the International Poets’ Society for his award winning piece on tiromancy. It wasn’t until all his prized possessions were collected together in one place that Gus noticed a theme to his likes.
Grammy Weist’s place was sort of an oasis. Similar to other residences in The Gish, from the outside one could still see the unmistakable traits of an old meat packing plant once converted into overpriced condos. Now those condos were illegitimate workfare apartments containing city dwellers otherwise mimicking the social decay of greater Kings Row. A simple, uninformed walk to the train could cost a thrill-seeker his life. Yet, on the inside, Grammy’s place looked like something out of a roaring Deco magazine spread, immaculate, tasteful, and high-end in every regard. Ornate white trim bordered every floorboard and doorway bubbling up hand-carved, non-repeating reliefs shaped like flower clusters and winding vines. The mock copper ceiling was stamped out in countless squares each of which encapsulated simple geometric shapes, complimentary to the next square by forty-five degrees, the whole plate covered in a low-gloss, white enamel that spread broken light from each room’s differing chandelier over the bumps in the pattern. There were wall sconces that looked to be burgled from the Chrysler Building, beveled chair rails and imported wainscoting that would make Martha Stewart weep, and even the added bonus of a wrought iron spiral staircase that ascended to a second level. A sitting room and a den each contained Vermont marble fireplaces further warming the vaguely gold interior along with dark red throw rugs and deep cherry wood furniture. Gus had never seen an actual settee or a sideboard until now. The same could be said about the very tall, pull-chain toilet in the bathroom whose tank was about two inches from the ceiling. Foyer, library, dining room, standing wet bar, roll top desk, vaulted archways, solid silver trays and tea settings, fine china in a massive Americana hutch stationed strategically distant from the grand piano across the apartment in the salon, it was as if Gus had stepped into a different dimension. Every classic item in the place had been positioned to draw one’s eye to the next. This wasn’t just an apartment. It had lines, class, and a soupcon of understated glamour. Homier than a museum with delicate design and decorative technique falling mere notches short of clutter, to Gus such a fragile and well-kempt environment could only mean one thing…PARTY!
All the nearby power lines made cell phone reception on Grammy’s street a joke. After checking in on her and the case workers at the assisted living facility, Gus spent the day riding the rail and ringing up every number in his full SIM card. Sure, Sandusky was days away, but for a place this nice and this large at this price to suddenly open up to the hard core party circuit, people would hitch if they had to. Gus would have called it a house warming, but house beering seemed the more accurate notion.
Three nights later the rave was in full swing. Of course, one’s network of like-minded friends when that one travels on the Xanadu soundtrack, more for ONJ than ELO, meant that by “rave” they were really talking about a soiree barely two degrees of separation from an alcoholic spelling bee. It was a night of mixed and low-market Canadian ales and Buds, bottled, not canned. The evening’s conversations, as inebriated ones tend to do, spanned subjects as egghead haut as quantum physics to others as base as the theory of orifices. In place of the tokeables and decent acid your average biker might find at a get-together, Gus’ gathering had at least ten homespun games that required Scrabble tiles, a lightning-round-only Pictionary station and a bughouse version of backgammon being run tournament style in the salon. Impromptu karaoke quartets broke out randomly while competitive attempts to slide the helix railing on the staircase became the night’s greatest challenge. The scene, as was, barley warranted mentioning that the party was devoid of female presence.
A wise-ass man once said that a good buzz is the sudden, jarring awareness that time cannot be measured in seconds or minutes. Long about the part of the evening when the average blood-alcohol content was .23, Gus was way beyond the bell curve. He’d been striking creatively lewd positions on the chaise lounge for high res’ digital posterity when a loud crash came from the upper level. Gus’ reaction was first delayed by the secret Heineken flowing through his veins and then further pushed off by the strung out realization that he had no idea what anything in this apartment cost. Thereafter, he darted up the spiral staircase, though to any onlooker he more meandered over and around invisible groundhogs than he did dart. The top of the spiral let out into the library, a somewhat dark and still chamber, replete with first edition texts and a décor that made even health nuts want to throw on a dressing gown and smoke a big pipe. Three cronies had made their way up around the monstrous oak desk in the library to debate the Dewey Decimal system and to joke about having murdered a fictional butler, Clue-style, a butler whom at least two of them were sure was a monkey. With the bleary-eyed homicide reenactment had come a few too obvious footprints on the desk blotter and the punch drunk “discovery” of a slide away panel in the ceiling. The panel had been punctured by a less than pointy head, crumbling to the ground in pieces and allowing nested stair sections to roll out in a horrendous series of thumps.
Gus tried to muster a clear string of verbal outrage to befit the sight, but took pause given the beer gas bubble seemingly crammed halfway up his chest, mid-belch. Frakes was in a leather armchair laughing hysterically at the irony while William, Sandusky’s Beavis quotes champion, attempted to mitigate. William explained in sentence fragments, each beginning and ending in “dude,” all about the butler monkey and his perilous demise at the hands of brown bottle fiction. Frakes, having finished a seemingly endless guffaw, then interrupted and rolled back in time a single subject to instead explain how they were previously debating etymology, a dangerous, room-wrecking subject by all counts. Gus tried to be responsible, but a few angry steps toward the trio layered adrenaline onto his altered state, again failing to form any actually audible sentence, but succeeding in a mysterious gimp. Meanwhile, Arnold Radich, of fly unzipped fame, jumped back several lines of dialogue in an apparent attempt to make everything okay by explaining from the inebriated beginning.
Arnold had begun with how this library reminded him of his 4th grade library which was all Dewey Decimal and newly offered that Frakes was a Library of Congress man, himself. There had thusly been a lengthy pretzel stick sword fight over said schism before the conversation turned to Admiral Dewey and thereafter to all things named after other things, quite the think tank agenda. Somewhere beyond Martin Luther King Boulevard, all the ships named Enterprise, a random kid named August, Muppets coming from puppets, oranges, Swiss cheese, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, New Jersey, and a near kick boxing match over the fact that everybody had claimed a different word origin for abracadabra, they had soon decided to ask the butler. After all, any such Clue-looking room should have a butler and anybody rich enough to have a butler could afford a monkey. A court stenographer’s head would have imploded.
Having heard Arnold out, Gus realized that a good scolding and the filament of logic he’d be able to graft onto his dismay just weren’t going to play to this audience. His attention instead turned to the unfurled staircase. Gus approached it with wonder. He didn’t know there was an attic. Who had ever heard of an apartment with an attic? Plus, if this had been a meat packing plant, what unsightly atrocities would have been dismal enough to need an attic? The ravers, realizing that they were probably off the hook, under the auspices of Arnold’s liquored reminder, bounced back into the abracadabra debate. William re-upped his claim that it was from the Hebrew, ha-brachah, meaning “The Curse.” Arnold pointed to Aleister Crowley as the originator while Frakes gave a list of possibilities, two of which included lines from Bewitched reruns, original Darren notwithstanding. Gus barely slowed down as he fit his more certain two cents in.
“No, it’s from Turkish, and the Turks take it from Aramaic. Avra kedavra, ‘What I speak is destroyed.’ Even Latin takes its word for corpse from kedavra.”
The library went silent. Real partiers aren’t accustomed to a sudden serious tone or an argument that makes even mediocre sense, especially when that sense comes from the drunkest one of them all. Now the attic stairs and Gus’ ascent were center stage. Gus peeped his head and eyes just above the rim of the opening, his footsteps creaking the whole way. It was dark, very dark, the kind of dark that swallows up light hungrily. The space inside might have once been larger, given the full, interlocking stair sections that had telescoped into a standard flight, but was now penned up into a single, cramped room the size of a modest, walk-in closet. Each corner was within Gus’ arm’s reach and he hadn’t even attempted to pass the fourth step from the top. He’d expected insulation and beams, wood with an exposed galvanized nail head or two, but the room echoed like stone and smelled more like the hollow innards of a mossy stump. As Gus smoothed his full arm length over the floor of the room, it felt clean, surprisingly clean. There was no dust or grit rolling around, not a mouse dropping or stray splinter. Doing the same with his opposite arm drew out a similar pristine slice in the pitch when it, almost startlingly so, touched something. Gus grabbed and drew his elbow back into the library light to reveal a full folio sized book.
The text looked more than ancient, it looked other-worldly. The characters would fade onto and off of the page, sink into the browned creases and rise again as if floating through mud. On the taut, leather spine, calligraphic scrawl, barely legible, scrabbling out only a few cryptic words. The first atop, a conundrum, the word Grenoble. And if that didn’t sound foreign enough, beneath it was twisting the more mysterious word, Felucca.
Of course, most of the dancing glyphs could be explained by the fact that during the last few hours, Gus shared more in common with a pile of hops than he did with any human smart enough to read. Given that and the rather anticlimactic emergence of a book from the secret room into a library otherwise filled with books when guests would have preferred a mummified pigmy or a treasure map to Hallie Berry’s underwear drawer, the find got shelved in the starker reference section for Gus to revisit later. The party lasted two more days.
The following Friday, Gus had reached that triumphant moment when the last beer bottle makes it into the recycle bin. He would have had the cleaning done sooner, but three day party equals two day hangover, both of which he’d spent visiting his grandmother. Today would be his first chance to look in the paper for a job. Gus grabbed the Paragon Times from the floor in the hallway, brought it to the breakfast table where he’d set out cold pizza and grapefruit juice, and began perusing every other slot between the endless gal Friday ads. His eyes settled upon one opening for a grill man at the Green Gables Café when somehow the shape of those letters reminded him of the old attic book from five nights prior. Beer had then quelled any semblance of curiosity, but midway through a semi-stale bite of his double chicken and onion slice, the question mark hanging over his head was too much to live with. Gus ran to the library.
Today, while faded and vague, the letters seemed to move around far less. In truth, they didn’t move as much as they did morph in form. Gus blamed his astigmatism and the fact that he’d left his glasses in Sandusky, but even so, that didn’t explain what looked like Cyrillic letters shifting into Egyptian hieroglyphics and then into alephs, kalephs, and spotty daggesh fortes. For a moment, he swore he saw a Greek delta just before it changed to both Roman numerals and what an eighth grade trip to a reservation allowed him to remember were Cherokee notations. Gus actually spent some time musing over whether or not this was angelic script before the forms became more recognizable. English, it had hit and stuck on plain English, every page.
The book read now as a chronicle, the chronicle of two personages named Grenoble and Nacht who’d ventured through a land called Felucca replete with dark magic and monsters. The story spoke of a great black pearl shortage that saw man and beast traveling to the far corner’s of unknown realms, and Felucca seemed to be the riskiest among them. While Gus didn’t understand a great deal of the entries, several spoke of something called a Moongate, which, as best as Gus could ascertain, was a portal to another dimension. It was the only means of entering Felucca and frighteningly, one of the only ways back. Many of the entries were fully chronicled while others were obviously interrupted quite suddenly, further indicating the danger of a Fellucan pilgrimage.
Gus poured over the text for an entire day. There was just something captivating about it, something documentarian about the manner in which magic was described, Ultimata, the author called it. Grenoble, the writer, in amidst the many entries about Nacht coming to his rescue, took tangential time to describe spells and the origins of magic. Most didn’t make sense, much in the way Harry Potter fiction was a free-for-all of amateurish continuity. Yet, throughout the read Gus came out feeling empowered. He was not only absorbed by the passages, but felt as if he’d been gleaning some richness from the words. Barely aware of how much he was skimming, he still came out at the end of each canto feeling the accomplishment of memorization and the pride of a job well done. It was weird.
While most of the spell sections lacked common sense, canto thirty-three was of particular note. It included a description and illustration of a Moongate. Gus realized he had seen something very similar before. The pictures in the paper of Rikti portals looked quite like the Moongate illustration, somewhat round for the sake of balanced energies, but stretched so that hominids might walk through erect. Gus’ eyes dead stopped on this page. He felt rushes of concern and wonder as his blood pulsed boomingly. He momentarily thought this was somehow a hidden solution to the Rikti conflict before allowing sharper thought to drive the train. Surely Rikti portals were in some way technology based. What if this was an instruction booklet to an alternative? What if this book could magically create portals that would allow the U.S. Marines to beam into the war zone and thieve the element of surprise? Rikti advantage over non-supers would be completely eclipsed. Gus had found newer purpose and allowed the waves of endless possibility to roll over him as he studied the entry.
Grammy Weist had made it seventeen weekly bingo sessions before the boredom of suburban golden years took shape. She’d begun insisting that Gus come twice a day as opposed to his normal singular visit. Gus, of course, readily obliged despite his double shifts at Pizza Hut and full nights spent mulling over the Moongate passages. While the treasured visits slowed Gus’ progress in understanding the entry, the truth was he’d been about as successful as a level three gravity controller trying to take on a Peregrine Island Warhulk. English text or no, The Chronicles of Grenoble and Nacht in Felucca left him baffled. It wasn’t as if black pearls and sulfur were lying around the parking lot of the Galaxy City Blockbuster and these were ingredients the alleged Master Mage, Grenoble, had strewn across several pages. Gus had tried to improvise with Circle of Thorns salvage purchased at bargain basement prices from the black market, but to no avail. Moongates, portals, whatever the canto was trying to document, it seemed an exercise in academics only.
Come the first Saturday of double visits to the home, Gus had run out of new things to tell his grandmother. The Hut had no new toppings. Employee of the month was going to have to wait again. The Datsun had become uninteresting conversation two decades prior. He was somewhat doomed to listen to the tales of Ruby and Tallulah, Grammy Weist’s sesqugeneric suitemates. His quality time torture began about six p.m. and visiting hours weren’t over ‘til ten. The conversation started with a story about getting her first set of dishes for free, one at a time, from the Rialto movie theatre watching serials on the silver screen. The next time Gus feigned workable consciousness, the story had moved on to the evils of standard airbags and flame retardant pajamas. An epoch later, Grammy was on to the muscular boatswain’s mate, Bill Haden she’d met on her trans-Atlantic voyage, a man who’d last vied for her affections before she met and fell in love with Gus’ grandfather, Wilbert, at Ellis Island. Fifteen minutes remained before the nurses would kick him out for the night.
Grammy finished on a new track before the evening drew shut. Much out of character for herself, she’d started in on questions to Gus that took him off guard. His mind still pondered the Moongate conundrum, but his face was the perfect poker shape to con Grammy into receiving it as full attention. She asked how he liked Paragon and the apartment. She asked if he’d been dating anyone special and a few less than noteworthy inquiries about Gus’ preferred type. She even briefly took one accidental segue out into the conversational realm of radio shows and Inner Sanctum, before bringing her focus back to her grandson’s distractions. Short only two minutes to lights out, Grammy Weist hit with a stumper that Gus translated as,
“Gussy, I can tell you’re preoccupied. You really should tell me what’s wrong so I can work a grandmother’s magic.”
Gus had no idea how to sum up weeks of decrypting a completely foreign and near nonsense text in a two minute schpiel. For that matter, he didn’t know whether it was something he’d be willing to reveal to his grandmother at all, what with the gaping hole in her ceiling. It was just easier to skirt the issue, and adding guilt onto guilt, that’s just what Gus did.
“Grammy, I’m just worried about how to take care of your place properly. You’ve got such great stuff. It’s nothing really.”
Grammy Weist sensed the deflection, but as sharp grandmothers do, she rolled with what was made available. Gus continued to listen through her thick accent, still hearing her meaning more than her sounds.
“Well, Gussy, it’s simple really. A place for everything and everything in its place.”
Gus gave only one kiss and one hug before running to catch the yellow line.
2 a.m. and sick of all pizza permutations, Gus tried to keep Ben & Jerry’s drippings from splattering the Moongate diagram. All around him at the table were Paragon Times archives, on loan, describing Rikti portals, plus a few too many dictionaries of the Occult. At that point Gus had even resorted to treating D&D accessories as source materials. Logic was a long way off. Frustration was more familiar to him than excitement. All other concerns were not so much as a blip on the radar. Failure was ever-present. About to fall asleep in the chair, Grammy’s advice shone through the mental mess. “A place for everything, and everything in its place!” It was as if the shape of those very words formed a skeleton key that would unlock margins and reveal the pith of the mysterious Chronicle. There was something in that passing pleasantry that simply felt as the missing piece of a puzzle, the last brick in a wall. All his research and numbing attempts at clarity had hopped over one important detail. He never used the book in the attic space.
Carrying the folio two handed, he lumbered hurriedly up both the spiral and extended staircases. He needed no light, as by this time all his Moongate attempts were memorized times over. The attic was still dark and the makeshift apprentice lurched into the blinding pitch surer than ever. Gus placed his hand on the book and intoned a litany of presumed incantations, front to back and back to front. Nothing. He mustered his best guesses at Latin pronunciation and Greek inflection. Still nothing. Confident, Gus looped words piecemeal from different incantations into almost nonsense strings of gibberish. Come 4 a.m., the attic remained a dark, motionless room. Gus slumped into the blackest corner, again dismayed. Odds were, by now, that if there were any reality to this book, he’d have randomly stumbled across a working conjuration by now. Monkeys would be writing Hamlet first, at this rate. He let out a sigh of defeat and almost jokingly quipped aloud, “Abracadabra?”
Gus didn’t know if it was the plain word, or the word spotted on the end of his long verbal mantra like punctuation, but the ensuing quake didn’t give much time dwell on the question. Painted china rumbled in place throughout the apartment as raw power was pulled in electric slivers from every junction box in a one block radius, piercing the attic walls and dancing in space. The chandeliers could be heard rocking in rooms far off and dusty pebbles of brick and mortar violently shook from the building in a pattern that sounded like sudden rain. Shadows ripped up from floors and swirled upward into the boxy room like dark dust devils filled with smoke. Carpets cringed on the floor as the whole structure shifted slightly with a loud crack that was heard for miles around. Gus had to fight the impetus to jump down the stairs and run clear back to Sandusky. And then, an illuminated split in the very air before him blazed fourth in an orangish glow. It had finally worked.
The split was not as round as he’d expected. Surely, Gus had done something wrong. The portal, if that’s what it was, looked more squarish and awkward. The light it emitted looked to be attempting linear shapes, but burped up random bubbles and dark patches that made it read as uneven and in some ways broken. The fibers on Gus’ sweater pulled toward the opening and his hair yanked forward. The air around him whooshed by as it to got sucked into the opening, carrying with it every speck of dust and every remnant of pizza odor left in the home. The sheering drag summoned him closer, pulling at his sneakers’ grip on the floor, underscoring the idea that if this wasn’t a portal, it was indeed some kind of pure vortex. There seemed only one way to find out.
Gus stood. He reassured himself that Grammy would be fine and that an event like this would be nothing in comparison the triumph of trying it out. He had no idea where the shaky portal might lead. If a Moongate, perhaps he too was off to Felucca. If not that, perhaps the Rikti home world where certain death would await. Whatever the cost, the prospect was too attractive to refuse. Gus readied his stance, opting to jump headlong rather than step, and took a moment only to pray. Wind rushing, dust blasting his eyes, Gus’ prayer was just about through when his concentration, dulled as it was, got interrupted by a series of audible beeps.
It was his cell phone. He thought of ignoring it, in fact, he thought hard on that more than once. Yet, it wasn’t a call. His ring tone was set and stuck on the unenviable stylings of Rick James’ Superfreak. This beeping was different, and a vibrant curiosity in the cell phone signal abyss that was King’s Row. Even at that, the undulating faux gold light just one step away should have been enough to ignore the cell, but let’s face it. Cell phones just need to be answered.
Gus yanked the contraption from his pocket and flipped it open in one smooth motion. He cocked his wrist toward the light of the magic portal as if to see better. Loose papers flashed up from the apartment below and got swallowed in the light. Gus leaned back from the urgent pull. The cell phone signal, five bars strong, clearly came from the pillar of light. A few savvy thumb gestures letter, Gus had revealed a bizarre text message. The sender identified himself only as Mantlet. The title of the message came through in all caps as WARNING! Gusts growing, thumbs dancing, Gus responded.
The warning spoke of a band of Super Heroes that called themselves Apotheosis and the danger they tried to fight via something called Ouroboros. The text was a bit fractured and hackneyed, but one thing was certain, Gus had never heard of any hero named Mantlet. Level 50 heroes were in the paper everyday and it was hard for a commoner to escape their notoriety. Though this Mantlet claimed to be from Paragon City, Gus was sure that he was either a trickster or from someplace altogether different. Gus’ return texts scoffed at the sender’s claims and only barley served to push a dialogue forward. Winds swirling around him, it was all Gus could do to analog back, engrossed just as much in the increasing pull of the light as in the mysterious texts from the “other side.” Only the word, WARNING had stayed his feet with reason.
This Mantlet claimed a goodly number of questionable truths. He was supposedly hold up in some secret Apotheosis lair, typing away at a workstation while conducting experiments. He stated that he’d acquired the ability to slapdash together a Rikti portal device from salvage and wildly made the additional claim of being able to time travel with yet another device. His hypothesis, as incomprehensive as it seemed, revolved around opening a time travel portal inside a Rikti portal, and the fear that it could lead to a result he called “paradimensional,” a wartime front for which the U.S. was not ready. He conducted experiments in secret in hopes of relaying warnings to heroes in the honeycomb of polydimensia, rallying them to a cause of a unified Paragon offense. To date, this one signal was the only he could establish. It was all a little too much for Gus to digest, but he couldn’t deny that it was happening. The bottom of the staircase began to lift a little from the floor. The desk blotter had flown up and just missed Gus’ head before getting engulfed. The instability around him was growing, strongly, and now he was faced with trumping these potentially bogus and time-eating texts by signaling back that he was just a man, not a super hero. With said message went explanations as to the book, the portal, Gus’ intent to enter, and what was certainly building to an explosion of some sort if this Mantlet didn’t leave well enough alone.
Mantlet worked fast. Short texts came in reading only, “No!” and “Wait!” and a quick “Please!” Gus humored them, despite the fact that the oak desk in the library had just shifted. He could hear glass breaking and what sounded like faint pig squeals twisting through the wind. The ceiling began to vibrate. Gus’ skin started to ripple over his muscles. Whatever this Mantlet character was going to do, he had about ten seconds to do it or Gus was going to take his chances stepping through and talking face to face.
Gus was wrong about those ten seconds. In only two, the blast of light slapped closed with a horrendous snap and threw him, bodily, back down into the library, crashing over everything in his path. All the moisture spinning through the air condensed into tiny bits of sleet and dropped on him as if thrown from a bucket. Papers slowed from the breeze and again sought out the assuredness of gravity. Grammy’s place rang its way to eventual quiet again like the after-tone of striking a piano key or tuning fork. Gus sat up in the stillness, nose bloodied, forehead cut in more than one place. About six feet from him was the folio, the whole Chronicle perceivably intact. Gus smiled a bit as he reached for the cuts on his head, sucking blood back with a sniff. At the very least, with the book, he could try again, perhaps with better results. Today though, it looked like he was more meant for Band-Aids, a hot bath, and another two-day round of cleaning Grammy’s apartment. Gus tilted his head back, managed a more relaxed sit, and squeezed his nose shut, grabbing a blank tax form to be used as a tissue. Success was success, no matter what the outcome.
The silence seemed almost unbearable now. It sat and sat and asked nothing of itself but to sit some more. It settled in on Gus to the point where he could hear himself bleed. It was a long quiet stretched over thin air and sudden calm. Nonetheless, silence is only contained in moments, waiting out the next heartbeat or footstep to witness its own destruction. In this case, it gave way to a familiar beep. Gus brushed aside the pile of light trinkets that had come to rest to his left and grabbed his cell phone. It beckoned even as he lifted it. He checked for new text, uncertain as to whether there’d been enough time to zap through any message of gravitas. There was one, new entry. It offered no text in the body, only an attachment. This mysterious Mantlet must have been at the ready to download it at a moment’s notice. That said something about both him and the contents. The “To” field read only “Triumph,” the “From” field, “Freedom,” apparent codenames both. It wasn’t until Gus had fully fiddled with his menu to open the attachment that he realized what it was. He had to scroll to get the full length of the entire title on screen, but there was no mistaking what it said.
The Complete and Unedited Instructions on Becoming a Magic Super Hero
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Friday, December 28, 2007
Triumph Update
So, a quick update on what's going on with our SG on Triumph. See below for details.
Firstly, our SG base has expanded some. I dropped the startup multipurpose room and added an Arcane Power and an Arcane Control rooms. We now have power a-plenty and a fair amount of control as well for the base. With that extra capacity, I was able to modify the base layout a bit and add a second teleport pad. The second pad goes to Faultline and either Skyway or Galaxy City (I can't remember which right now).
I'm saving prestige now for an Inspiration Storage item and an additional Enhancement Storage table. After that, I'm thinking an additional teleport bay might be in order.
As far as characters go, Ater Custos is about halfway through Level 48 and has access to all the nice Portal contacts for AV missions in Peregrine Island. Also, I've been using him to experiment with playing the market a bit. After a week of leaving stuff up for sale (starting with 5M influence to his name), he's now up to 43M influence. That does include the 15M from the sale of that Purple IO, but crafting/salvage costs were substantial, so the net profit from that was somewhere around 11M. So, bottom line is I think I have a line of sight on some good techniques to work the market if we need influence for anything. Nice thing is that they are not time intensive, maybe a 1/2 hour a day, if that, to check the market and do some quick crafting.
I've also been playing Tankology lately, my Ice/EM Tank. I've been jones'n to get back Tanking since Mantlet and our 50s have been sidelined. He's up to Level 15 now after a couple nights (nobody was online for Tight Night this week, so I pulled him out for some Tank action). Ice plays differently than Invulnerability for sure, but it's entertaining. I've been experimenting with some different IO sets for him, as well. Focus is on aggro control and survivability and not on damage output. When he does his job on teams, the other team members catch little to no aggro and can blast/scrap away to their hearts content. He's gonna be a fun Tank I can tell.
Anyway, happy Kwanzaa and we'll see you guys later.
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First Purple!
So Ater Custos got, I think, our first Purple Recipe drop. Surprisingly it was off a L48 Wisp Overseer in the Storm Palace area of the Shadow Shard.
Crafted the recipe and put it up for auction, sold this morning for 15M influence. Not a bad windfall.
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Saturday, December 22, 2007
PDF chart for IO sets
Found this on the CoH forums, thought I would post it here for you guys...
Invention_Sets.pdf
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Monday, December 17, 2007
Ater Custos hits 46
Yup. With the extra team runs and such this past week, Ater Custos hit Security Level 46 the other night. The end is in sight now, and power selections are locked down. His build now is as highly optimized as I can make it without dumping obscene amounts of influence into the build.
Three 4-slotted sets of Impervium Armor for +6.75% max endurance. With the Atlas Medallion accolade, his Max Endurance is 111.75%. His AoE attacks are a mix of Cleaving Blow, Tempered Readiness, MultiStrikes, and Scirocco's Dervish. All are at ED cap for damage, have in excess of +80% accuracy, and around an 80% endurance reduction with some -Recharge thrown in. Throw Spines also has +40% slow enhanced on it, since it produces the biggest slow effect when it hits. Tough is slotted with 3 Titanium coatings for the +Max Health and also a Steadfast Resistance/Defense for the +3% global defense boost. Weave is 3-slotted with two Gift of the Ancients for the +2% Recovery with an extra L45 Defense IO to hit the ED cap for the power. Lunge is 6-slotted with Touch of Death for the +2.5% global damage boost and the +3.13% Melee defense. Impale is 4-slotted with Thunderstrikes for the + 2% Recovery and +7% global accuracy boost. I respec'd out of Acrobatics and slotted a Karma: Knockback protection into Combat Jumping. It's not quite as good, but I plan on picking up a Steadfast: Knockback protection IO at Level 48. That should give Mag 8 protection, which will cover everything except some AVs and the Ritki Pylons in the war zone.
Overall, I have carefully tweaked the build and set bonuses to add +Max Endurance and +Recovery to offset the extremely high endurance load from the Spines/Dark Armor combination. Additional +Regen was added to the build to help with reducing reliance on Dark Regeneration, and Tough and Weave from the fighting pool have rounded out the Smashing/Lethal resistance and overall defense of the build. Solid defense values (not great, but they are the first layer of damage mitigation), good resistances from my toggles, a great healing power coupled with +Regen, and improved health (through set bonuses and accolades) all add up to a layered threat mitigation strategy that I swear by. It's proving to be damn effective, as I teamed with a random PuG last night on a Banished Pantheon map, and the mobs were all +3 to me but I could solo spawns sized for an 8-man team solo. The masks and shamans were the only real threats, and Ater has very high defense and resistance to Psi damage, which is what they were throwing out. Taking out the shamans with AoE and single target attacks came first, and then pounding on the masks while the husks staggered around me being shredded by my damage toggles. It was fun, to say the least.
Soloing in the Shadow Shard to fund purchases worked well. The spawns of CoT there are ideal for me to shred, as they are not resistant to Lethal or Negative Energy damage and vulnerable to stuns from Oppressive Gloom. Death Mages are still tough customers, but they go down quickly under a focused attack chain.
With Oppressive Gloom running, the only real threats soloing are Brutes, since the Watchers (eyeballs) have debuff ranged effects and the Brutes hit like a freight train. They are immune to the Stun effect from OG, so there's no damage mitigation there, it just comes down to Ater's slows, movement to keep them off balance, and AoEs to shred them down to size. Harder for Ater than for Flambeau, as Flam just pulls them in and hammers them. Ater needs some footwork to keep him in the green. Not hard, but a more active fight than others... Probably why I like them, as they are more of a challenge. : )
Anyway, Ater's teamed up to defeat about half the Praetorian AVs in the Portal missions. Let's see... Siege, Battle Maiden, Black Swan, Shadowhunter, Dominatrix, and Chimera. I'm working through my Portal contact missions to get to the remainder. Fighting AVs is tough. Dominatrix was an unbelivable bitch to fight. She's a grav controller and all the damage our team was throwing was nerfed like crazy. Like single digit crazy. It's like my spines were made of rubber or something. One of our team logged their /Rad Controller and managed to debuff her enough to slowly finish her off. Even then it was a 15 minute long marathon battle to put her out of commission. Ugh.
Anyway, see you guys whenever. It's holiday time and Rob's out of Tight Night until next year. Have fun and enjoy the Figgy Pudding. : )
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Winter Event 2007 is now LIVE!
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Just A Tank vs. Brute Thought
LOL! While I was always aware of the staunch mathematical difference between Brutes and Tanks in-game, not having a toon of my own that represented either class always left the visual difference up to just a slight sliver of fictional separation in my head. I'd think about The Incredible Hulk differing from Bane. I'd think about Ben Grimm differing from an Urukai or Juggernaut. Those differences in thought, however, were merely ethical differences for the most part.
Well, the other night, as Charlynn had kicked my snoring ass out of the room in hopes of getting Isabelle to sleep in the silence, I saw The Hills Have Eyes (1) for the first time. Okay, first, ick! Second, they might as well have called the movie "What it takes to make a Democrat a Republican." Fun. Yet, my God! That scene where the "miner" in the wheelchair says, "It's breakfast time!" followed by that brute coming through all the walls after the protagonist. It just wouldn't give up. The relentlessness of it! The unstoppable, blood lusting fever of it! Sure, I guess it's still a matter of ethic in my head, but the difference is no longer slight. Maybe I was tired, but the scene actually rattled me. I kept thinking about what the hell I would do in that situation (because coming up against nuclear mutant miners happens frequently in Queens). The answer inevitably came out as, "I would die."
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Saturday, December 1, 2007
Need help with Mantlet Respec
OK guys, I need some help here. We have a Freespec coming on December 7th. I already have one on Mantlet, so it makes sense to use it before then (since you can have only 1 per character at any time). The help is I need to know what direction to go with for Mantlet.
When we get together with our "Big 3" characters, he plays two roles. First and primary role is aggro management for the team. This usually means trying to keep the heat on him so Orleans and Cacaphony don't get more than they can handle. Lately I've been a bit out of practice Tanking, which isn't such a big deal since Orleans and Cacaphony are much more durable in their old age then they were as young heroes. However, the second role Mantlet fills in our trio is that of laying down the damage and "soft control" with the knockback/knockdowns. Orleans pushes out great damage, Cacaphony does as well (but is somewhat hindered by the scaled damage for Defenders), but it seems like the damage Mantlet dishes out is a key element as well.
So, I'm at a bit of a crossroads. Looking at a respec'd Mantlet that can perform at Exemplared levels, I'm faced with a tough choice. First route is to focus on the "Tank" aspect of the character. Aggro control, defenses/resistances, and (perhaps most importantly) adding Psi defense/resistance with IO's and set bonuses. I have a draft build that drops Punch, Combat Jumping, and Resist Physical Damage and swaps in Boxing/Tough/Weave. This means one less attack in his attack chain, but with IO sets generating substantial Recharge bonuses over SO's, this may not be an issue (i.e. the chain will tighten up so the extra attack is not needed to fill it out). By 4-slotting Impervium Armors in Mantlet's Resist Damage powers, he gains up to 9.4% Psi defense. Since Unyielding has a -5% defense to all, this would mean his Psi defense would start at 4.4%. The Steadfast Unique adds +3% defense to all, bringing it up to 7.4%. Weave adds 5% unenhanced, around 7.4% slotted up. This brings Psi defense up to about 14.8% Scirocco's Dervish 6-slotted in Footstomp gives an extra 3.13% Psi defense, bringing it up to 17.93%. Problem is that this gets expensive and Mantlet only has 8M in the bank with probably 3M tied up in enhancements slotted (can be sold during the respec). Since Psi is the single biggest hole in the Invulnerability set, this would make him essentially able to viably Tank anything in the game for the team.
The other route to take is to focus on combat capabilities. IO set selection would be focused on +damage set bonuses, +Recharge, and endurance recovery/regen to offset the lower resistance/defense values in the build (compared to a more "Tank" build). Attacks would be six-slotted early to maximize exemplared performance. While I could probably squeeze in some Psi defense/resists, it would not be as robust a build.
Question for you guys is would you rather have more Tank, less damage or more of a Scranker build leading the charge? I could probably find some middle ground as well, but wanted to see what input you all had first...
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