Post by redsycorax on May 3, 2022 3:58:39 GMT
Earth-378:
Here, on November 9, 1979, NORAD headquarters, the Strategic Air Command, the National Military Command Centre and Alternate National Military Command Centre were horrified to discover that two thousand Soviet nuclear ICBMs were en route for their country. On other worlds, despite Secretary of State Zbigniewski Brzezinski being notified, PAWS surveillance satellites discerned that the alleged attack was a false alarm and forces in the Soviet Union and United States both stood down. It was later found that training scenario software had inadvertantly been left in the system. However, on Earth-378, the false alarm was all too real. As a consequence, the Soviet Union and the United States fell over the precipice after a year of antagonism over events in North Korea and the Iranian Revolution. As a consequence, over one hundred and sixty million Americans were killed in the first minutes of the nuclear exchange. At that point in time, that world's metahumans, the Law Enforcement Executive, were meeting in Charlottesville, North Carolina, and thus, they survived the holocaust for several months. Mysta, Flame Girl, Hangman, Captain Flash and the Unknown could not defy fate forever, though, particularly given their courage, valour and sacrifice in mitigating the worst immediate initial effects of the War. However, several months later, they were experiencing the consequences of their earlier valour...
NB: Secret identities: Linda Dale (Flame Girl), Keith Spencer (Captain Flash), Bob Dickering (Hangman). The Unknown and Mysta are not baseline humans and thus have no civilian identities.
++
CHARLOTTESVILLE: MARCH 1980: DOOMSDAY PLUS FIVE MONTHS:
Flame Girl stood, looking bleakly at the overflowing graveyard and the boarded stores. In the distance, gunfire sounded and she swallowed. Her colleague Mysta stepped toward her:
"I'm sorry, Linda. I know Keith was close to you." During the onset of the nuclear holocaust around them, the Law Enforcement Executive had done their utmost to insure the safety of those around them, at the cost of their own safety and ultimately, lives. Despite the hazard from atmospheric radioactive debris, Captain Flash had ferried people from outlying remote farms inward to shelters, but doing so repeatedly had insured that he received a cumulatively fatal radiation dose, despite his metahuman strength and speed. To be sure, Keith Spencer had been buried with full solemnity and respect for his sacrifice- but that didn't diminish the sorrow and heartache from the women and men who had known him, or, in the case of Flame Girl- Linda Dale- loved him.
"If radiation poisoning can fell Captain Flash, one of our strongest members, what hope do we have, Myz? Look around us. Charlottesville is under martial law with summary executions. They shoot refugees from devastated urban communities like Washington or Richmond. The federal and state governments don't exist anymore. Raider gangs prowl the countryside. People are starving, dying from preventable diseases turned into pandemics, or dying from radiation poisoning. Will any of us still be alive after a year of this?" Mysta noticed the foreboding in her colleague's voice and remembered that Flame Girl had been active on the borderline rural area, using the retardant aspect of her flame control abilities to insure safety for those in underlying areas who were being evacuated to town shelters as well. She hadn't had a radioactivity test herself, but there were already tell-tale signs if one looked at her closely enough. Greying hair, incipient baldness, spots on her arms and legs and accelerated tooth decay had begun as Flame Girl's body began to succumb to radiation damage. And Linda probably knew it as well, but she wasn't talking about it. She would probably go on for as long as she could.
Mysta sighed: "I know. And I've got some bad news. I think Bob-Hangman - has it." Like Captain Flash and Flame Girl, Hangman had volunteered in the hinterland areas, fighting fires where some dry timber had been ignited. In the process, he had stayed out in the open too long as well. As with the other Charlotteville firefighters who had received a cumulatively fatal radiation dose, and his colleagues, Bob Dickering was now clearly affected and had retired from crimefighting to tend to his personal health in his last remaining weeks of life. He had made additional sacrifices too.
"I'm not surprised after he, Keith and Unknown travelled over to what's left of Cheyenne to bring down that Army of God terrorist group. Who knows about Unknown, but... I'm sorry to hear that. At least he and Unknown can be open about their relationship now. There's no-one left to care. Dear God, though, Myz. When I adopted this identity after my brother was killed and decided to carry on his legacy, I never thought it'd end like this. It's like we're sliding over a precipice into the fires of hell and there's no-one left to prevent it."
"All we can do is to mitigate suffering and assist the recovery effort."
"Do you really believe that we will recover, Myz? Deep down?"
"If I didn't, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Our mission has always been to defend the weak and vulnerable. To our last breath." As Mysta turned to ready their guard duty over the town's remaining medical supplies and borderland guard duty, Flame Girl had a coughing fit. She concealed it with a hasty handkerchief to her mouth, but when it came away, there were spots of blood and sputum over it.
CHARLOTTESVILLE: AUGUST 1980: DOOMSDAY PLUS TEN MONTHS:
And inevitably, it came down to that. Cholera and typhus had ravaged the town and social order had almost completely disintegrated. The LEE found themselves run ragged trying to prevent raider gang attacks on individual homes and firearm incidents across the breadth of the ailing town. As time went on and the ravages of starvation, epidemic disease and radiation poisoning ran their course, the outbreak of crimes of desperation and avarice began to subside as the town inexorably drained of living inhabitants and the raiders perished in the radioactive wilderness in their camps, tunnels and caves. But like their fellow inhabitants of Charlottesville, the LEE were not immune from their poisoned environment. First, Bob Dickering (Hangman) succumbed to his own battle against cumulative radiation poisoning over a fortnight after Captain Flash's funeral. Then, Linda Dale, Flame Girl, began to feel ill as the signs of her own impending decline became more and more obvious, even to herself, despite her best intentions to carry on for as long as she could. Within another fortnight, she was too weak to get out of bed. Unknown and Mysta nursed her with the last of their hoarded medical supplies, as the last mortal human member of the LEE slowly succumbed to dementia, diarrhoea and haemorrhaging. When she felt that she could take no more pain, she shakily swallowed a barbiturate suicide pill mixture.
As there were no surviving gravediggers left to do it, the two heroes busied themselves burying their last fallen colleague in a disused football field. Although Charlottesville had mercifully avoided the mushroom cloud and fiery immolation, it finally proved unable to withstand the onslaught of plague, famine and anarchy that ensued in its wake. Despite the best efforts of heroes like the LEE, one hundred and twenty thousand people had perished in the ensuing months. The few, erstwhile survivors were skeletal, malnourished and coughing blood. Small children, the elderly and the disabled had long since succumbed. It wouldn't be long before even that dwindling remnant succumbed to the twilight gloom around them. As Mysta and Unknown listened to the crackling shortwave band, they learnt that Charlottesville was not alone in its desolate fate. Across the United States, Europe, Eastern Asia, South America and Australasia, other isolated inhabitants of "spared" communities had fallen silent, one by one. Humanity was nearing extinction and the survivor of an alien lunar colony and the eldritch presence that had fought alongside her would soon be alone on a dead, irradiated planet floating silently in space.
"You don't need to stay here any longer, Mysta. There's nothing left to preserve or safeguard any more." It was the story of her life, Mysta reflected, thinking back to the fall of her original farside alien refugee lunar colony settlement to the Nors plague, which had wiped out most of its inhabitants and left Mysta the only survivor, to be discovered by Apollo 18 in 1972 and enabled to resettle on Earth, where her invisibility, invulnerability and prodigious visual abilities had led her to join the newly established Law Enforcement Executive, alongside Captain Flash, Flame Girl, the Hangman and the Unknown. But now, apart from her ethereal enigmatic colleague alongside her, the LEE was gone, as was almost all human life on Earth.
"What will you do now?"
"Return to the Afterlife. Perhaps seek to preserve justice and peace elsewhere in the cosmos. What about you?"
"I talked about that with Brad before he passed away. I think the best solution is to use that transmatter device that he designed, given the absence of amenable space travel away from this charnel house."
"Where will you go?"
"To a world of decency, justice, light and happiness. Far away from this one. Leave it to its memories and ghosts, if there are even any of those left."
CHARLOTTESVILLE: ELEVEN MONTHS AFTER DOOMSDAY: SEPTEMBER 1980:
And so it was. One evening, the wind whistled through the desolation of Charlottesville and nothing remained there except funereal silence outside the hotel that housed the Unknown and Mysta. During the next morning, it was determined that the very last, sickly erstwhile survivors within the increasingly silent and sepulchural town had taken the option of barbiturate overdoses and quietly abandoned their world grown hellish. A fortnight later, on the day that the final human being left alive put a bullet through his temple in a foetid bunker far below the remnants of Leningrad, Mysta gently kissed her swirling, nebulous colleague goodbye as she strode into the green, effervescent portal. Its energies surrounded her and then she was gone. Behind her, the Unknown became more and more tenuous as his outline became increasingly hard to discern, although there was now no-one and nothing left on Earth-378 that could comprehend the departure of that world's last living beings from the universe in which it was embedded. Nothing more is known about Earth-378's fate, because there was no-one left to experience or record it.
EARTH-500:
Mysta stepped out of the portal and into a green field, where the sun shone, birds sang and there was a definite melee elsewhere. A young Native American archer was angling an arrow at a scowling African-American figure who was using reflective technology in a manner that suggested criminality. A gaudily dressed red clad man in cowl and uniform lay stunned on the ground as the "Mirror Master" (which turned out to be his actual nom de guerre) malevolently angled his reflectors toward him. Mysta ran forward and dropped down to embrace the man, protecting him with her personal force screen. As it turned out, she needn't have bothered, given that a winged woman had appeared from nowhere and stunned the miscreant with a blow from what seemed to be a technologically enhanced mace. As Mysta shut off her forcescreen, the newcomer and archer walked over to her:
"Awesome. You saved our friend Flash's life."
For a moment, Mysta remembered Keith Spencer, Captain Flash, her fallen friend on the charnel house world she had abandoned. But no, this young Japanese-American man was very much alive:
"I'm Mysta. I was a member of a Badhynis colonisation effort on an alternate Moon to your own and I was the sole survivor of the expedition. After that, I fought crime and antisocial behaviour on an alternate Earth to this one as a member of the Law Enforcement Executive. However, that Earth and everyone on it was obliterated by a nuclear holocaust. The LEE tried to do our best to insure justice and social order prevailed but piece by piece, it all fell apart and my human comrades died of radiation poisoning. Eventually, I was the only one left. So I spotted your world on the LEE's Heisenberg Alternate Probability Index link and decided to come here. If you'll have me."
The hawk woman smiled: "Hey, Mysta, welcome. We belong to a metahuman law enforcement group ourselves, the Justice Alliance of America. You look like you'd be a natural for it."
"Thank you. I hope I'm worthy."
Green Arrow smiled: "The more the merrier. What, Shay?"
"Did they have cliches that bad where you came from, Mysta?"
Mysta laughed. It was a long time since she had been able to do that and it abruptly ended in a sob as she realised the enormity of what she had been through and that her long ordeal was finally over. And with that, Mysta became the latest member of the Justice Alliance of America.
THE END [12.30 PM, MAY 6, 2022: Further expansion of detail]
Here, on November 9, 1979, NORAD headquarters, the Strategic Air Command, the National Military Command Centre and Alternate National Military Command Centre were horrified to discover that two thousand Soviet nuclear ICBMs were en route for their country. On other worlds, despite Secretary of State Zbigniewski Brzezinski being notified, PAWS surveillance satellites discerned that the alleged attack was a false alarm and forces in the Soviet Union and United States both stood down. It was later found that training scenario software had inadvertantly been left in the system. However, on Earth-378, the false alarm was all too real. As a consequence, the Soviet Union and the United States fell over the precipice after a year of antagonism over events in North Korea and the Iranian Revolution. As a consequence, over one hundred and sixty million Americans were killed in the first minutes of the nuclear exchange. At that point in time, that world's metahumans, the Law Enforcement Executive, were meeting in Charlottesville, North Carolina, and thus, they survived the holocaust for several months. Mysta, Flame Girl, Hangman, Captain Flash and the Unknown could not defy fate forever, though, particularly given their courage, valour and sacrifice in mitigating the worst immediate initial effects of the War. However, several months later, they were experiencing the consequences of their earlier valour...
NB: Secret identities: Linda Dale (Flame Girl), Keith Spencer (Captain Flash), Bob Dickering (Hangman). The Unknown and Mysta are not baseline humans and thus have no civilian identities.
++
CHARLOTTESVILLE: MARCH 1980: DOOMSDAY PLUS FIVE MONTHS:
Flame Girl stood, looking bleakly at the overflowing graveyard and the boarded stores. In the distance, gunfire sounded and she swallowed. Her colleague Mysta stepped toward her:
"I'm sorry, Linda. I know Keith was close to you." During the onset of the nuclear holocaust around them, the Law Enforcement Executive had done their utmost to insure the safety of those around them, at the cost of their own safety and ultimately, lives. Despite the hazard from atmospheric radioactive debris, Captain Flash had ferried people from outlying remote farms inward to shelters, but doing so repeatedly had insured that he received a cumulatively fatal radiation dose, despite his metahuman strength and speed. To be sure, Keith Spencer had been buried with full solemnity and respect for his sacrifice- but that didn't diminish the sorrow and heartache from the women and men who had known him, or, in the case of Flame Girl- Linda Dale- loved him.
"If radiation poisoning can fell Captain Flash, one of our strongest members, what hope do we have, Myz? Look around us. Charlottesville is under martial law with summary executions. They shoot refugees from devastated urban communities like Washington or Richmond. The federal and state governments don't exist anymore. Raider gangs prowl the countryside. People are starving, dying from preventable diseases turned into pandemics, or dying from radiation poisoning. Will any of us still be alive after a year of this?" Mysta noticed the foreboding in her colleague's voice and remembered that Flame Girl had been active on the borderline rural area, using the retardant aspect of her flame control abilities to insure safety for those in underlying areas who were being evacuated to town shelters as well. She hadn't had a radioactivity test herself, but there were already tell-tale signs if one looked at her closely enough. Greying hair, incipient baldness, spots on her arms and legs and accelerated tooth decay had begun as Flame Girl's body began to succumb to radiation damage. And Linda probably knew it as well, but she wasn't talking about it. She would probably go on for as long as she could.
Mysta sighed: "I know. And I've got some bad news. I think Bob-Hangman - has it." Like Captain Flash and Flame Girl, Hangman had volunteered in the hinterland areas, fighting fires where some dry timber had been ignited. In the process, he had stayed out in the open too long as well. As with the other Charlotteville firefighters who had received a cumulatively fatal radiation dose, and his colleagues, Bob Dickering was now clearly affected and had retired from crimefighting to tend to his personal health in his last remaining weeks of life. He had made additional sacrifices too.
"I'm not surprised after he, Keith and Unknown travelled over to what's left of Cheyenne to bring down that Army of God terrorist group. Who knows about Unknown, but... I'm sorry to hear that. At least he and Unknown can be open about their relationship now. There's no-one left to care. Dear God, though, Myz. When I adopted this identity after my brother was killed and decided to carry on his legacy, I never thought it'd end like this. It's like we're sliding over a precipice into the fires of hell and there's no-one left to prevent it."
"All we can do is to mitigate suffering and assist the recovery effort."
"Do you really believe that we will recover, Myz? Deep down?"
"If I didn't, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Our mission has always been to defend the weak and vulnerable. To our last breath." As Mysta turned to ready their guard duty over the town's remaining medical supplies and borderland guard duty, Flame Girl had a coughing fit. She concealed it with a hasty handkerchief to her mouth, but when it came away, there were spots of blood and sputum over it.
CHARLOTTESVILLE: AUGUST 1980: DOOMSDAY PLUS TEN MONTHS:
And inevitably, it came down to that. Cholera and typhus had ravaged the town and social order had almost completely disintegrated. The LEE found themselves run ragged trying to prevent raider gang attacks on individual homes and firearm incidents across the breadth of the ailing town. As time went on and the ravages of starvation, epidemic disease and radiation poisoning ran their course, the outbreak of crimes of desperation and avarice began to subside as the town inexorably drained of living inhabitants and the raiders perished in the radioactive wilderness in their camps, tunnels and caves. But like their fellow inhabitants of Charlottesville, the LEE were not immune from their poisoned environment. First, Bob Dickering (Hangman) succumbed to his own battle against cumulative radiation poisoning over a fortnight after Captain Flash's funeral. Then, Linda Dale, Flame Girl, began to feel ill as the signs of her own impending decline became more and more obvious, even to herself, despite her best intentions to carry on for as long as she could. Within another fortnight, she was too weak to get out of bed. Unknown and Mysta nursed her with the last of their hoarded medical supplies, as the last mortal human member of the LEE slowly succumbed to dementia, diarrhoea and haemorrhaging. When she felt that she could take no more pain, she shakily swallowed a barbiturate suicide pill mixture.
As there were no surviving gravediggers left to do it, the two heroes busied themselves burying their last fallen colleague in a disused football field. Although Charlottesville had mercifully avoided the mushroom cloud and fiery immolation, it finally proved unable to withstand the onslaught of plague, famine and anarchy that ensued in its wake. Despite the best efforts of heroes like the LEE, one hundred and twenty thousand people had perished in the ensuing months. The few, erstwhile survivors were skeletal, malnourished and coughing blood. Small children, the elderly and the disabled had long since succumbed. It wouldn't be long before even that dwindling remnant succumbed to the twilight gloom around them. As Mysta and Unknown listened to the crackling shortwave band, they learnt that Charlottesville was not alone in its desolate fate. Across the United States, Europe, Eastern Asia, South America and Australasia, other isolated inhabitants of "spared" communities had fallen silent, one by one. Humanity was nearing extinction and the survivor of an alien lunar colony and the eldritch presence that had fought alongside her would soon be alone on a dead, irradiated planet floating silently in space.
"You don't need to stay here any longer, Mysta. There's nothing left to preserve or safeguard any more." It was the story of her life, Mysta reflected, thinking back to the fall of her original farside alien refugee lunar colony settlement to the Nors plague, which had wiped out most of its inhabitants and left Mysta the only survivor, to be discovered by Apollo 18 in 1972 and enabled to resettle on Earth, where her invisibility, invulnerability and prodigious visual abilities had led her to join the newly established Law Enforcement Executive, alongside Captain Flash, Flame Girl, the Hangman and the Unknown. But now, apart from her ethereal enigmatic colleague alongside her, the LEE was gone, as was almost all human life on Earth.
"What will you do now?"
"Return to the Afterlife. Perhaps seek to preserve justice and peace elsewhere in the cosmos. What about you?"
"I talked about that with Brad before he passed away. I think the best solution is to use that transmatter device that he designed, given the absence of amenable space travel away from this charnel house."
"Where will you go?"
"To a world of decency, justice, light and happiness. Far away from this one. Leave it to its memories and ghosts, if there are even any of those left."
CHARLOTTESVILLE: ELEVEN MONTHS AFTER DOOMSDAY: SEPTEMBER 1980:
And so it was. One evening, the wind whistled through the desolation of Charlottesville and nothing remained there except funereal silence outside the hotel that housed the Unknown and Mysta. During the next morning, it was determined that the very last, sickly erstwhile survivors within the increasingly silent and sepulchural town had taken the option of barbiturate overdoses and quietly abandoned their world grown hellish. A fortnight later, on the day that the final human being left alive put a bullet through his temple in a foetid bunker far below the remnants of Leningrad, Mysta gently kissed her swirling, nebulous colleague goodbye as she strode into the green, effervescent portal. Its energies surrounded her and then she was gone. Behind her, the Unknown became more and more tenuous as his outline became increasingly hard to discern, although there was now no-one and nothing left on Earth-378 that could comprehend the departure of that world's last living beings from the universe in which it was embedded. Nothing more is known about Earth-378's fate, because there was no-one left to experience or record it.
EARTH-500:
Mysta stepped out of the portal and into a green field, where the sun shone, birds sang and there was a definite melee elsewhere. A young Native American archer was angling an arrow at a scowling African-American figure who was using reflective technology in a manner that suggested criminality. A gaudily dressed red clad man in cowl and uniform lay stunned on the ground as the "Mirror Master" (which turned out to be his actual nom de guerre) malevolently angled his reflectors toward him. Mysta ran forward and dropped down to embrace the man, protecting him with her personal force screen. As it turned out, she needn't have bothered, given that a winged woman had appeared from nowhere and stunned the miscreant with a blow from what seemed to be a technologically enhanced mace. As Mysta shut off her forcescreen, the newcomer and archer walked over to her:
"Awesome. You saved our friend Flash's life."
For a moment, Mysta remembered Keith Spencer, Captain Flash, her fallen friend on the charnel house world she had abandoned. But no, this young Japanese-American man was very much alive:
"I'm Mysta. I was a member of a Badhynis colonisation effort on an alternate Moon to your own and I was the sole survivor of the expedition. After that, I fought crime and antisocial behaviour on an alternate Earth to this one as a member of the Law Enforcement Executive. However, that Earth and everyone on it was obliterated by a nuclear holocaust. The LEE tried to do our best to insure justice and social order prevailed but piece by piece, it all fell apart and my human comrades died of radiation poisoning. Eventually, I was the only one left. So I spotted your world on the LEE's Heisenberg Alternate Probability Index link and decided to come here. If you'll have me."
The hawk woman smiled: "Hey, Mysta, welcome. We belong to a metahuman law enforcement group ourselves, the Justice Alliance of America. You look like you'd be a natural for it."
"Thank you. I hope I'm worthy."
Green Arrow smiled: "The more the merrier. What, Shay?"
"Did they have cliches that bad where you came from, Mysta?"
Mysta laughed. It was a long time since she had been able to do that and it abruptly ended in a sob as she realised the enormity of what she had been through and that her long ordeal was finally over. And with that, Mysta became the latest member of the Justice Alliance of America.
THE END [12.30 PM, MAY 6, 2022: Further expansion of detail]