by Prometheus
The young gentleman sat casually cross-legged in the metal chair outside the Cafe'. One of many, during this crowded dinner rush of business. A subtle-yellow long sleeve buttoned at his wrists, meeting the brown, plaid-knit Edwardian vest in a nice blend. The dark trousers precisely folded just above black loafers. His brown, tweed coat hung from the back of the chair, moving to the breeze with the same rhythm as his short, black hair; parted down the middle, to end in slight curls.
Turning to the next page of the newspaper that he held before him, one eye continued to watch the two men sitting five tables away, on the other side of the outdoor lounge area. The back of one of the men facing him, he could, at small intervals, make out the other facing not quite directly towards him.
And he watched, this Edwardian gentleman. He watched, as he had all day, the two strangely unique men. He watched them with curious eyes.
Suddenly, there was a small, pleasant one-note chime that pinged from the gold pocket-watch resting along its gold chain, in his vest pocket. Flipping it open, he glanced at the time with a frown. Pressing another switch, the face of the time piece also flipped open, revealing nothing more than a simple mirror.
The gentleman stared into his own reflection, as the face of a young, blonde girl appeared.
all agents
this is an emergency
return to haven
all doors are open
Her voice was warm, but haunting. Her eyes, shadowed by the other side of the looking glass.
The gentleman snapped the watch shut, replacing it. Then, throwing a few coins next to his now-chilled cup of coffee, slid his coat back on, and proceeded to walk down the sidewalk; the newspaper folded under one arm.
The two men that he had been watching continued to chat seemingly oblivious.
"....so, sure, the term 'God' is an interpretive concept. But, I mean, really. Blaming a perceived concept because you have a bad life is one thing....." Tayden continued, "....but trying to lay the blame on Christ himself--an actual historical figure....a real person....that is KNOWN to have existed--...well, now, that's just simply childish..."
"...uh-huh..."
Grissom, although previously intent in this theological debate, had begun drifting as he still held his wine up, staring intently into it.
"It's as absurd as blaming a hangnail on Gandhi, or, Chicken Pox on Mother Theresa..."
Montag finally looked back at Tayden, his face etched in curiosity.
"I do hope you don't mind if I interrupt you with something a bit off the subject...."
"Not at all..." Tayden shrugged.
"Well, you know the smartly-dressed gentleman that has been following and watching us for the past few hours?"
Tayden's eyes perked up.
"Someone's been....watching us?" he asked in slight surprise.
Grissom continued staring at him.
"Yes. And I've been watching him in the reflection of my wine glass."
"You...have?"
"Yes. And you know what I recently noticed?"
"What?"
"That he's leaving...." Montag stated, giving a head tilt back, leading Tayden's eyes to center on a neatly-dressed man steadily getting further away down the sidewalk.
"Then, maybe we should follow him....?" Tayden asked, just going with the flow.
Grissom quickly threw his glass of wine back, downing it in three seconds, sharply replacing it onto the table.
He took a deep breath from the intake, cut a pair of devilish eyes up at the angel, and replied: "Bloody brilliant!"
The two quickly threw some money down, and began walking in the direction of the man, still just barely visible almost an entire block ahead of them.
"So, what do we do when we catch up to him?" Tayden asked, walking briskly beside Montag.
Grissom moved sideways as a mother and her child passed between them.
"Rough 'em up?" he asked in return, his accent thick.
"Nah." Tayden shook his head, as the two made their way through the crowded sidewalk, never losing sight of their target. "Too predictable."
"Perhaps we can ask why he's been following us?" Montag asked.
"How do you know he wasn't just looking for a date?"
"He lost the nerve to ask, then?" Grissom shrugged.
"Maybe he couldn't decide which one of us he liked more..." Tayden replied.
"You swing that way?"
"Nope. You?"
"Nahh."
"So, I guess it's back to questioning him, then..."
"What if he won't answer us? What if we have to force it out of him?"
"Ooh! 'Good Cop/Bad Cop'!" Tayden gasped with a possible mock urgency. "Which one can I be?"
"The 'Good Cop', of bloody course...." Grissom sighed with a sardonic roll of his eyes.
"What if I want to be the 'Bad Cop'?"
"You've got the imprint of a halo still in your hair, and you want to be the 'baddy? Not bloody likely...."
The gentleman suddenly turned sharply down into the alleyway behind the local dry cleaner. Tayden and Grissom followed up, walking down the alley, just as he was turning a second corner behind the shops.
The two quickened their pace, coming around the second corner to a dead halt. The gentleman in question was now standing there in front of them, looking them up and down squarely.
"Good evening!" he said politely with a bright smile.
Grissom glanced at Tayden, then back again.
"Hello." Montag replied. "Mind telling me why you were following us?"
The gentleman tilted his head with a slight perplexion, and cunning smile, his hands buried in his pants pockets with ease.
"Why were you following me, eh?" he replied.
"Because you were following us...." Tayden stated matter-of-factly.
"Ah, recursion...." the gentleman said. "...a truly enchanting concept. I would sincerely love to stay and discuss this with you. But, I'm afraid that I am in a bit of a rush gentleman....if you'll excuse me...."
Before the two could respond, he looked behind him and mumbled one word:
"Z..."
A thunderclap of blue, prismatic light spiraled open, the funneling disc of bent space roaring with turbulence.
The gentleman looked back, nodding with a polite smile.
"Another time, perhaps?" he yelled over the turbulence.
And with that, he stepped through the wormhole, it re-sealing immediately.
Grissom looked over at Tayden with a perplexed frown.
"You saw that, too....right?"
******************************
As the grey blanket of clouds washed through the sky, a subtle calm hovered over the island of La Perdita. Tropical vegetation swayed to and fro to the ever growing breeze, light swirls of dust kicking up along the northeastern shoreline. Frothy waves crashed with a mounting intensity over the beach. Flocks of exotic birds passed through the skies, their nervous tittering a quiet reminder of the devastating weather that had previously visited the isle only a month hence.
Far off to the northern tip of the shore, the golden white sands began to meet fields of ankle-high green. The soil, a thicker, blacker cake of ancient muddy ore, spread under the foliage like tar; another reminder of another devastating natural occurrence to befall the island. However, it had been well over two-hundred years since the dormant volcanic giant, dominating the northern tip of the island for over a hundred miles in diameter, had gasped its last breath. Its form was eternally silent.
A monument of nature's imperialism over man.
Without warning, or witness, the gusts of breeze tearing through the downward slope-funnel of the mountainside suddenly roared with a burst of turbulence well beyond its natural state. An explosion of vividly-green grass ripped along the wake, clumps of black soil spraying into the air like drops of rain. The turbulence tore across the fields, and shot straight up the arched precipice of the volcano, suddenly dying down close to a hundred meters up and along the rockface.
And there, where the turbulence melted into the naturally calmer breeze, stood Tobias Christopher.
Panting from slight exertion, the redhead reached down, grabbing the back of his knees. He pulled his upper torso down into a stretch, keeping his legs taught the entire time. A meager film of sweat glazed his body, rimming the thick, red mane of his forehead. Skin-tight black Umbro shorts, and a gray, sleeveless sweatshirt sat splotched with the same sweat. Coming back up into full stance, he then proceeded to twist along his waist, from left to right, stretching his apparent musculature fluidly. The blaring of the wind, a bit harsher at his current perch, cut above his hearing, drowning out the sizzle of the smoking, white-hot metallic tread humming off the bottom of the Schanze-built running shoes.
He finally straightened full up, taking a final deep sigh. His eyes wide with satisfaction, the sprawling vista of the island crawled with a delicate grace into the horizon before him. Rolling his vision slowly back and forth, he drank the view like one might consume fine art. Since the first week he had set foot on La Perdita.....since the first day he had lived in Puerta Meubela.....the metahuman speedster named Tobias Christopher had maintained a routine jog every morning.
It was a routine of exercise. It was a routine at practicing his special skill. And, most of all, it was a routine of just appreciating where he lived, every day. Fifty-six thousand laps around the geography of the tropical isle in under an hour was always an exertion, at best. But, the view at the end was, for him, more than worth it.
And, though brash stubbornness and an impetuous spirit defined him equally, when it came to La Perdita, even the fastest man on the planet stopped to smell the roses.
Tobias propped his foot up onto one of the outcropped rocks, leaning with both elbows across his leg, staring out. The air, breezy and cool at this altitude, was unusually silent. Very little was stirring among the vegetation. Even traffic from the main expressway, only a mile away, was sparse.
There had been an unease in the air since he first awoke that morning. Alot of the team had seemed....pensive. Like having an itch they could not scratch, the employees of the Metahuman Business League (M.B.L.) Consulting Agency had all dispersed throughout Del Mar even before he left for his run. Some alone, some in pairs, everyone was active today. Everyone.....restless.
Tobias, lost in thought, slowly began creasing his eyes. And that's when he felt it. He dropped his eyes down, staring at the rough rock upon which he stood. There was no visible movement. Nothing even remotely stirring along the mountainside. Yet, Christopher's hyper-accelerated awareness was proving that incorrect by the minute.
For Tobias, motion was everything. And the fact that he could feel motion, where none was visible, began to disturb him.
His eyes followed his senses, his head beginning to turn slowly behind him to face the wall of rock. He watched the wall briefly, and, ever-so-slowly, Christopher's head began to tilt up. He stared, feeling a steady pace. Quick, but without gravity's downward pull. Forceful, but without the backlash of inertia. Something moving due to.....pressure. Something flowing with the curvature and volume of a semi-liquid state. Something flowing.......straight up the volcano...
His eyes widened, a realization dawning upon him.
The volcano was active.
"...no way..." he breathed, staring up along the immense summit. And, then, he was a blur.
Vaulting to six-hundred-twenty miles an hour, Tobias scaled the side of the volcano in less than forty-seven seconds. His heels shredded a path of rock as he dug into a dead stop at the edge of the mouth.
Standing on the cusp of the enormous interior crater, his eyes scanned across the wide open pit. The walls of the volcano rose three-hundred feet from the black, barren surface inside. He knelt forward against a rock on one leg, trying to pinpoint the location of motion. Trying to track the veins of magma currently building pressure under the ancient cork of ash and ore. It was only a simple minute for the speedster to scan the entire landscape. His pupils began to glow a faint white, absorbing and refracting light faster than the visual spectrum should allow.
Cracks had formed along the surface of the interior, small, sickly wisps of volcanic gas and steam escaping into the atmosphere. A thick, white haze dominated the entire area, making it difficult to see clearly. With no direct sunlight to perforate the blanket of gas, it was exceptionally easy for a tiny sparkle of white light to catch Christopher's eye. He locked his view on the sparkle, coming from somewhere near the center of the interior.
And, as Tobias was prone to do, he resisted the smart thing to do, in contacting the others, and decided to investigate himself. Climbing at half-speed down the interior of the inward slope, his nose wrinkled at the noxious gas billowing by his face. It was at this moment a thought struck him....
Why wasn't he dead?
Volcanic emissions were commonly known to be instantly poisonous. Yet, except for the smell, his lungs had yet to collapse in contact with the gas. And, being that he could track the flow of magma that was obviously building under the cap, why did he feel no real heat? It was warm. A real....humid...putrid-warm. But, nothing worth setting his clothes on fire, it would seem. He gingerly stepped down onto the uneven, black surface of the dead ore, feeling the stability. Then, gaining confidence, he finally set off at around seventy-miles-an-hour towards the sparkle.
Plumes of white and gray streaked past his view, keeping his caution and reactions in place, making sure that he wasn't running headlong into anything blocking his path. While hisses of steam passed his ears, the only real sound dominating the horizon was his feet as it clapped against the ore.
Finally, the mist seemed to spread away as he came to a stop. And there, in the middle of the volcano itself, he found the sparkle of light. Kneeling down, he stared with subdued awe at the semi-circular, oval-long bulge stretching out of the interior cap with the mass of a small automobile.
It was long and round, like the side of an egg, sitting only half-exposed from the ground. Tobias whistled, as he realized the nigh-transparent surface of the object was not glass, as he had previously guessed. But, indeed, it was diamond. Rainbow sparkles of light refracted from within it, Christopher seeing that it was merely the flow of magma directly under the orb bleeding through the diamond like a prism.
He was so enthralled with the object that he failed to spot a figure, cloaked by the foggy conditions, standing a few feet away to his right.
"You are not supposed to be here....."
Tobias jerked to his feet with surprise at the voice, whirling to the right.
"Who's there?!" he demanded, feeling a spark of hypervelocity beginning to build in his nervous system.
The figure stepped slowly forward, the mist parting to reveal a man. He was dressed in a burgundy button-up, a tight-buttoned-collar clenching his neck, and black slacks that matched black shoes, and, in turn, a pony-tail of black hair. A pair of dime-sized mirrors sat in each sleeve like cufflinks. His skin, a Caucasian pale, he appeared of normal size, and normal height. And staring back at Tobias, a pair of vivid blue eyes.
"The speedster. I should have known....." he replied with hints of sarcasm, glancing down at the crystalline-orb, and back again.
"I asked you a question, man." Tobias said, staring at him with nervous anxiety. "Who are you? What are you doing here?"
The man knelt down by the orb, running his hands over the surface.
"He didn't mess with you, did he?" he asked the oblong diamond.
"Okay, I don't know who you are, what's going on, or why this volcano is acting the way it is, but I'm getting really impatient here...."
"...shocking..." the man interjected.
Tobias grabbed the man by his arm, forcefully yanking him up into a standing position.
"I want some answers! Now!" he yelled with irritation.
The man slowly looked down at Tobias' grip, and back up with a look of indignity.
"My name is Tallmoore. Friday Tallmoore. Okay?" he replied, yanking his arm from the grasp.
"Okay, Mr. Tallmoore. Tell me what's happening here." Tobias said, folding his arms.
"....well...." Tallmoore began. "....you couldn't possibly grasp in that speedy little mind of yours what's really happening, even if I told you. Not that it's any of your fucking business. It's not like I'm looking for a fight......but, I'm running out of options here....."
"Well....tell me then!" Tobias demanded.
"What?" Tallmoore looked up with confusion. "Forget it. That's against my orders."
Tobias stared intently at him, getting angrier by the second.
"Oh what?!" Tallmoore sneered. "You going to hit me speed-boy? Good luck getting answers then. Just sit down and relax. I'll be off this island, and out of your hair in a few hours. Until then, just fucking calm down, and accept that you just can't know everything. Okay?"
"Is this volcano going to erupt?" Tobias asked.
"Yes..." Tallmoore nodded.
"Fuck that! There are a million people on this island!"
"Oh, Christ, have some faith, would you?" Tallmoore replied. "It's not like I'm a mass murderer........I think....."
"Okay, that's it..." Tobias said, turning, "....I'll see how calm you are after I get the rest of the guys....."
"No, I'm sorry, bucko. I can't let you leave...."
"Try and stop me." he replied over his shoulder.
With that, Tobias took off towards the walls of the crater.
Tallmoore sighed, shaking his head.
"What a stupid man ...." he mumbled. "....okay, Auguste......don't kill him...."
Suddenly, his eyes rolled into the back of his head. Flickering and rolling for just a second, they finally reset themselves. But, where there had been blue eyes, a pair of vivid green eyes sat, narrowing slowly, as a thin smile stretched across his face.
"Tut-and-bother, my dear Friday...." a much more defined, deeper voice emanated from the man called Tallmoore. "....there is no point for classtime if there is no recess...."
A single hand reached out.
Tobias was halfway across the chasm, as he suddenly began to slow down.
His expression grew wild and confused as he pushed against an unseen force, trying desperately to gain velocity. Yet, for every step he took, his feet drug harshly backwards against an invisible pull.
Hammering against the ground in one spot, his feet blurred into almost transparency. Still, he continued to be pulled backwards. He paused, finding that he stopped moving backwards, the moment he stopped trying to pull forwards. Looking around over his shoulder, he could see the hazy outline of Tallmoore in the distance.
Immediately, Tobias turned in place, shooting straight towards him in an attack. His fist got within a couple of feet from the man, even as the world around him suddenly exploded in force and light.
A perfect column of glowing-orange magma shot straight up from under his feet, catapulting the speedster, end-over-end. His body hit the ground limp, as consciousness seeped away.
Tallmoore walked over to him, looking at him for a second. Then, the same, thin smile began to grow wider.
"Shake-and-bake..." he mumbled to himself. "...crispy-fried joggers in the morning sunlight.....a poem if I did not know it..."
His hand reached out towards the unconscious Christopher with a malicious intent. Suddenly, his head lurched backwards, words and sounds gurgling with a strain from his throat. His eyes flickered and fluttered, rolling and jerking with some unseen battle. Finally, his head dropped, as he stumbled back a few steps, clutching his temples.
"....ddddaaaaaMMMNNN, Auguste!!" the voice of Friday Tallmoore spoke again, between pants of exertion. "....you fucking psycho....."
Regaining his composure, he looked back at the 'egg', then, over at Tobias.
"I'm going to get it in the ass for this one....."
Suddenly, his mirror cufflinks gained a young, haunting, female voice....
tallmoore the infinite
all agents are returning to haven
chaos has come
stand your ground
and await the coming
by order of the prophet
"Gotcha', Alice...", Friday nodded. He then turned back towards the orb, kneeling back down beside it.
"This just gets better and better, doesn't it?" he breathed.