Post by redsycorax on Oct 4, 2021 3:04:47 GMT
On Earth-109, the Justice Guild of America- Tom Turbine, Catman, the Streak, Green Guardsman, Black Siren and Cassandra - all epitomised courage, valour and sacrifice. In October 1962, during the Third World War that had escalated from a misstep at the time of its Cuban missile crisis, their heroism mitigated the worst effects of a nuclear detonation near their former base of operations, Seaboard City. Much the same can be said about their adversaries, the Injustice Guild, who found redemption and their erstwhile proteges, the Young Justice Guild, who emulated the heroism of their relatives and guardians. However, this story is about Ray Thompson, the protagonist in these events. What led the mutant in question to tyrannise and malevolently control the idyllic conservative facade of Seaboard City for over forty years?
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Ray Thompson was an unusual child. Shortly after his birth, his father was startled to see his infant son had formed perfect alphabetic and numerical symbols on a writing pad left by a maternity ward nurse. And at school, his advanced reading age and mathematical skills attracted praise and notice, enabling him to skip several grades. Needless to say, this didn't go down at all well with his school's local bullies, who ambushed him one afternoon as he was walking home. No-one has ever adequately recollected what happened next, but the next day, the gutted bodies of two of the bullies were found hanging, by their own entrails, from parkside trees. When questioned, Ray solemnly swore that there had been a large, duster-coated man in the shadows of the park that day and that perhaps that man was responsible for the grisly spectacle that met the eyes of Seaboard City's inhabitants. Justice Guild member Catman was mystified at the abrupt truncation of forensic traces and the inconclusive result of his investigations into the homicide in question haunted him for years afterward. However, he made a firm friend- young Ray Thompson was starstruck at the presence of one of his heroes...but made sure that no-one saw the preternatural, knowing, malevolent, warped adult smile after the incident was designated a 'cold case.'
Other quotidian tragedies occurred, underneath the radar of all but the most inquisitive onlooker. Louise Thompson found that after the birth of her daughter Sally, Ray's younger sister, she was incapable of having any more children. When a local gynecologist investigated, they concluded that the problem was with Anthony Thompson, who had witnessed the ten megaton nuclear test at Elugalab, Enewetok in the Marshall Islands, in November 1952. There had been deficiencies in the insulation from radioactive byproducts and radiation had permeated his gametes. One consequence was Ray's prodigious intellect and... other characteristics. Sally wasn't affected, but the warped genetic matrix that had formed Ray had left its legacy in Louise's ovaries. Anthony and Louise shrugged it off- they had a brilliant son and beautiful daughter. Besides, two children were enough these days anyway.
But that was the tip of a proverbial iceberg. One suspicious teacher found that the brakes of his car had failed as he took a hillside bend and his vehicle careened into space. Shaken, the man noticed Ray Thompson grinning with an expression that could never be that of an innocent child. After thanking Green Guardsman for rescuing him, the teacher applied for transfer to an adjacent city and left Seaboard during the very next week. Scott Mason was gratified at the effusive praise and simulacra of hero worship and took Ray to the next Justice Guild meeting, where the enthusiastic young man was made an honorary member of the organisation. Catman even made a sidecar for his Catcycle so that their 'mascot' could ride around with them. The Guild didn't realise that they were being played, apart from Cassandra Astriides, but her precognitive abilities only foresaw future events up to the forthcoming Third World War, after which electromagnetic, gravitational and spatiotemporal disturbance, coupled with her own imminent death. She coldshouldered him and he returned the favour and then, soon after, she died in the line of duty.
Thompson knew what was going to happen to him. He also knew that he would shortly lose his mother and sister when the Third World War began and the nuclear strike hit Seaboard City, but that didn't bother him. Nor did his imminent mutation into a misshapen creature with an enlarged head and shrivelled body. Truth to tell, that indelible fate was written in his genes and only awaited the ravages of the nuclear holocaust to fully awaken his latent abilities. And then came Nachteinbruch, 'nightfall', as dead Cassandra had called the ordeal that was shortly to engulf her surviving colleagues. And then came the dark days of late October 1962. Riding around with his dupes in the Justice Guild, playing the innocent, enthusiastic boy mascot, Thompson coldly watched as events reached their inexorable conclusion. And on October 27, 1962, they did, as a tragic misstep in the Carribean led to an escalating inexorable sequence of cause and effect that culminated in the unthinkable.
On the night of October 28, 1962, Ray and Sally Thompson quietly went to bed as Louise anxiously monitored the radio for news of Anthony, a US Navy warrant officer who had been deployed there several weeks ago as the crisis built. Numbly, she went through the motions of singing "Pop goes the Weasel" to her daughter as several hundred miles to the southeast, her husband's body bobbed in the burning oil slick that had once been his vessel, his eyes sightless. With trembling hands, Louise swallowed two capsules of Nembutal to tide her through the night, awaiting news that would now never come.
The Justice Guild thought that these events were beyond the comprehension of their 'young mascot' and wanted to spare him the sacrifice that they were about to make so they didn't consult him as they planned to avert and then mitigate the nuclear threat that hung over Seaboard City as the nuclear exchange intensified and Soviet ICBMs started to obliterate both major and minor United States metropolitan centres. With his abilities, Ray Thompson could have assisted them and spared the lives of his family and his adult superhero 'friends'. He was intent on his own ascension to full mutant enablement and coldly and calculatedly failed to intervene and disclose the existence and extent of his abilities.
And finally, it happened. The Justice Guild ended their heroic existence as a blinding white glare heralded the arrival of armageddon in Seaboard City and the shock wave slammed into suburban houses. Asleep, Louise and Sally Thompson made the silent transition from fatigue to mortality as the radiation surrounded the body of their son and brother. Ray's clothes ripped and tore and his head underwent unprecedented cephalic growth, losing his hair. He levitated from the ruins of his house and amidst the trauma and suffering of Seaboard City on Nachteinbruch, he telepathically made a faustian bargain with the survivors around him. He would restore Seaboard City to what it been days ago, to an everlasting technicolour paradise where death and hardship had been banished and where the thrall of war and death were eternally denied. Gratefully, the inhabitants of Seaboard City swallowed the fruit of the lotus.
Over the ensuing decades, they were to rue that day. Thompson did not accept questioning of his absolute rule and the facade at times wore thin. The Seaboard City Library's books contained blank pages. It also concealed a subway station that Thompson had neglected to wipe from existence, with incriminating newspapers that detailed the sacrifice that the real Justice Guild had made. Dissidents found themselves stranded outside the hallucinatory visit of Seaboard, dying of starvation and radiation poisoning. After it had happened several times, the city's survivors learnt never to question their lot in life. And then, as the century and millennium turned, strangers came to Seaboard City and met Ray and his phantasms of the Justice Guild of America. One of them, the Martian J'Onn J'Onnz, was a telepath and detected the shallowness and artificiality of their post-apocalyptic dream world. Provoked into fighting the Justice League of America, Thompson was horrified when his own psionic constructs broke away from his control and then turned on him, even if it meant sacrificing their existence. Unchallenged in his authority for forty years, Thompson fell before the combined strength of the Justice League and his own renegade simulacra. And then the facade dissolved and the hideous, dust-covered ruins of the real Seaboard City reappeared. The effort had been too much for Thompson, who died from an aneurysm as his fantasy of an arcadian city where the Justice Guild were still alive faded into oblivion.
Seaboard City's former inhabitants went off to find other surviving settlements. They left Ray Thompson's corpse unburied, much as he had done with the corpses of those that he had teleported outside Seaboard City. In time, as with those he had victimised, his remains decayed into a skeleton and then wind and time weathered that into bone fragments. In some corners of the abandoned city, images of the bygone Justice Guild and its former mascot lingered in yellowed torn newspaper sheets, with the roundtable of heroes and the energetic, smiling face of the hellchild who would one day puppet empty hallucinations of a utopian conservative past that overlaid a grim reality. No-one from Seaboard talked about Ray Thompson, not even in reference to their years of captivity. And unlike the legacy of the heroic Justice Guild, soon even memory of his tyranny and existence faded away into the erasure and oblivion of post-apocalyptic history and the everyday effort to survive amidst its adversity.
THE END
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Ray Thompson was an unusual child. Shortly after his birth, his father was startled to see his infant son had formed perfect alphabetic and numerical symbols on a writing pad left by a maternity ward nurse. And at school, his advanced reading age and mathematical skills attracted praise and notice, enabling him to skip several grades. Needless to say, this didn't go down at all well with his school's local bullies, who ambushed him one afternoon as he was walking home. No-one has ever adequately recollected what happened next, but the next day, the gutted bodies of two of the bullies were found hanging, by their own entrails, from parkside trees. When questioned, Ray solemnly swore that there had been a large, duster-coated man in the shadows of the park that day and that perhaps that man was responsible for the grisly spectacle that met the eyes of Seaboard City's inhabitants. Justice Guild member Catman was mystified at the abrupt truncation of forensic traces and the inconclusive result of his investigations into the homicide in question haunted him for years afterward. However, he made a firm friend- young Ray Thompson was starstruck at the presence of one of his heroes...but made sure that no-one saw the preternatural, knowing, malevolent, warped adult smile after the incident was designated a 'cold case.'
Other quotidian tragedies occurred, underneath the radar of all but the most inquisitive onlooker. Louise Thompson found that after the birth of her daughter Sally, Ray's younger sister, she was incapable of having any more children. When a local gynecologist investigated, they concluded that the problem was with Anthony Thompson, who had witnessed the ten megaton nuclear test at Elugalab, Enewetok in the Marshall Islands, in November 1952. There had been deficiencies in the insulation from radioactive byproducts and radiation had permeated his gametes. One consequence was Ray's prodigious intellect and... other characteristics. Sally wasn't affected, but the warped genetic matrix that had formed Ray had left its legacy in Louise's ovaries. Anthony and Louise shrugged it off- they had a brilliant son and beautiful daughter. Besides, two children were enough these days anyway.
But that was the tip of a proverbial iceberg. One suspicious teacher found that the brakes of his car had failed as he took a hillside bend and his vehicle careened into space. Shaken, the man noticed Ray Thompson grinning with an expression that could never be that of an innocent child. After thanking Green Guardsman for rescuing him, the teacher applied for transfer to an adjacent city and left Seaboard during the very next week. Scott Mason was gratified at the effusive praise and simulacra of hero worship and took Ray to the next Justice Guild meeting, where the enthusiastic young man was made an honorary member of the organisation. Catman even made a sidecar for his Catcycle so that their 'mascot' could ride around with them. The Guild didn't realise that they were being played, apart from Cassandra Astriides, but her precognitive abilities only foresaw future events up to the forthcoming Third World War, after which electromagnetic, gravitational and spatiotemporal disturbance, coupled with her own imminent death. She coldshouldered him and he returned the favour and then, soon after, she died in the line of duty.
Thompson knew what was going to happen to him. He also knew that he would shortly lose his mother and sister when the Third World War began and the nuclear strike hit Seaboard City, but that didn't bother him. Nor did his imminent mutation into a misshapen creature with an enlarged head and shrivelled body. Truth to tell, that indelible fate was written in his genes and only awaited the ravages of the nuclear holocaust to fully awaken his latent abilities. And then came Nachteinbruch, 'nightfall', as dead Cassandra had called the ordeal that was shortly to engulf her surviving colleagues. And then came the dark days of late October 1962. Riding around with his dupes in the Justice Guild, playing the innocent, enthusiastic boy mascot, Thompson coldly watched as events reached their inexorable conclusion. And on October 27, 1962, they did, as a tragic misstep in the Carribean led to an escalating inexorable sequence of cause and effect that culminated in the unthinkable.
On the night of October 28, 1962, Ray and Sally Thompson quietly went to bed as Louise anxiously monitored the radio for news of Anthony, a US Navy warrant officer who had been deployed there several weeks ago as the crisis built. Numbly, she went through the motions of singing "Pop goes the Weasel" to her daughter as several hundred miles to the southeast, her husband's body bobbed in the burning oil slick that had once been his vessel, his eyes sightless. With trembling hands, Louise swallowed two capsules of Nembutal to tide her through the night, awaiting news that would now never come.
The Justice Guild thought that these events were beyond the comprehension of their 'young mascot' and wanted to spare him the sacrifice that they were about to make so they didn't consult him as they planned to avert and then mitigate the nuclear threat that hung over Seaboard City as the nuclear exchange intensified and Soviet ICBMs started to obliterate both major and minor United States metropolitan centres. With his abilities, Ray Thompson could have assisted them and spared the lives of his family and his adult superhero 'friends'. He was intent on his own ascension to full mutant enablement and coldly and calculatedly failed to intervene and disclose the existence and extent of his abilities.
And finally, it happened. The Justice Guild ended their heroic existence as a blinding white glare heralded the arrival of armageddon in Seaboard City and the shock wave slammed into suburban houses. Asleep, Louise and Sally Thompson made the silent transition from fatigue to mortality as the radiation surrounded the body of their son and brother. Ray's clothes ripped and tore and his head underwent unprecedented cephalic growth, losing his hair. He levitated from the ruins of his house and amidst the trauma and suffering of Seaboard City on Nachteinbruch, he telepathically made a faustian bargain with the survivors around him. He would restore Seaboard City to what it been days ago, to an everlasting technicolour paradise where death and hardship had been banished and where the thrall of war and death were eternally denied. Gratefully, the inhabitants of Seaboard City swallowed the fruit of the lotus.
Over the ensuing decades, they were to rue that day. Thompson did not accept questioning of his absolute rule and the facade at times wore thin. The Seaboard City Library's books contained blank pages. It also concealed a subway station that Thompson had neglected to wipe from existence, with incriminating newspapers that detailed the sacrifice that the real Justice Guild had made. Dissidents found themselves stranded outside the hallucinatory visit of Seaboard, dying of starvation and radiation poisoning. After it had happened several times, the city's survivors learnt never to question their lot in life. And then, as the century and millennium turned, strangers came to Seaboard City and met Ray and his phantasms of the Justice Guild of America. One of them, the Martian J'Onn J'Onnz, was a telepath and detected the shallowness and artificiality of their post-apocalyptic dream world. Provoked into fighting the Justice League of America, Thompson was horrified when his own psionic constructs broke away from his control and then turned on him, even if it meant sacrificing their existence. Unchallenged in his authority for forty years, Thompson fell before the combined strength of the Justice League and his own renegade simulacra. And then the facade dissolved and the hideous, dust-covered ruins of the real Seaboard City reappeared. The effort had been too much for Thompson, who died from an aneurysm as his fantasy of an arcadian city where the Justice Guild were still alive faded into oblivion.
Seaboard City's former inhabitants went off to find other surviving settlements. They left Ray Thompson's corpse unburied, much as he had done with the corpses of those that he had teleported outside Seaboard City. In time, as with those he had victimised, his remains decayed into a skeleton and then wind and time weathered that into bone fragments. In some corners of the abandoned city, images of the bygone Justice Guild and its former mascot lingered in yellowed torn newspaper sheets, with the roundtable of heroes and the energetic, smiling face of the hellchild who would one day puppet empty hallucinations of a utopian conservative past that overlaid a grim reality. No-one from Seaboard talked about Ray Thompson, not even in reference to their years of captivity. And unlike the legacy of the heroic Justice Guild, soon even memory of his tyranny and existence faded away into the erasure and oblivion of post-apocalyptic history and the everyday effort to survive amidst its adversity.
THE END
