Post by redsycorax on May 28, 2024 3:51:02 GMT
In Seaboard City, a deceptive oasis in the midst of the post-apocalyptic wasteland of Earth-109, did the Justice Guild's legend inspire people to resist the tyranny of Ray Thompson's mutant dictatorship?
Here's one story...
+++
SEABOARD CITY, FEBRUARY 15, 1963:
Amanda Cinnamon was a strange girl. Truth to tell, if the war hadn't happened, she might have gone on to greater things, like a career in science akin to Seaboard City's own beloved Tom Tyrell (the Justice Guild's Tom Turbine), or become a brilliant journalist like Lyra Lewis. But the brutal nuclear holocaust that descended on the city on October 27, 1962 shattered and destroyed all such hopes. A well read young woman, Amanda possessed a particular ability that others would have longed for, except she kept it quiet. Hers was the gift of 'true sight', an ability to see through Ray Thompson's pastel romanticism and hallucinatory facade of an unchanging fantasy world. At times, what she saw in the real world beneath the ersatz confection made her stomach turn. The ruined buildings, roofless and walless apartments and houses, ramshackle beds, spam rations and the actual, shambling, unkempt and bewildered survivors around her broke her heart sometimes. It was tempting to submit to the illusion and pretend that you lived in a picture perfect golden age suburban world, full of laughing children, plenty and peace and light. Except she knew that this was all curated and manicured. Perhaps alone of her whole city, she was immune to his seductive nostalgia warp.
There were little quirks here and there that enabled her to keep her sanity. For example, Thompson's pathological hatred of Cassandra Astriides, the precognitive sixth member of the Justice Guild who had been erased from Seaboard City's post-apocalyptic memory by the vindictive mutant because alone of her comrades, she knew Thompson for what he was and would become and that his facade of childhood innocence would end with the war that he secretly longed for, even if it would mean the death of his feigned 'heroes', the Justice Guild of America. Slowly and stealthily, because her presence was untraceable by Ray Thompson, she collected artefacts of the brave Cassandra, magazine covers, buried plastic heroic figures, styled wigs, magnetic tape recordings. Thompson had thought that merely because he'd erased all visible signs of the hated heroine, people would simply forget her. In this, as in so many other things.
It was at a New Years Day party that she first realised that she was not alone. They had become anodyne affairs, purged of troublesome historical markers and with only vague memories of half-remembered current affairs. Not even the fact that the war year had ended on December 31, 1962 was acknowledged by anyone. 1963 was left off the readjusted calendars and only months were permitted. Only photographic images of the rest of the United States were permitted, strictly as it had been before the Cuban missile crisis had metastasised into the Third World War. And then Phil Dawson surprised her by whispering: "Happy 1963, Mandy..."
At first she thought she'd been hearing things. But by the end of the party, she'd seen several other markers of the forbidden mention of the new year. Carla Foccario handed her a cupcake with the Roman digits MCMLXIII on it- 1963. Even Toni Prentice, who wouldn't say boo to a goose, handed her a note with the numbers 1.1.63 on it. As they waited for their parents to drive them home, Phil and Carla motioned to her. She checked that none of the lotus eaters around them noticed, but no-one did. And so, telephoning her mother, she told her that Carla would give her a lift home later and that they were working on a homework assignment together. And because this world didn't have lover's lanes or flirting or romantic encounters at drive-ins, her mother accepted her daughter's story.
"So, what gives? I take it the rest of you are like me. That we all know that there's been a war, that Seaboard City got hit, and that somehow, all of us can resist Ray Thompson's mind control."
Carla nodded: "It's such an effort trying to pretend everything is all sunlit and normal when it isn't. Have you noticed? Anyone who resists Thompson gets killed in their tracks, even something as innocent as a direct reference to something that occurred during last year. Except for us. He isn't aware that we exist."
"It's like one of those Phillip K. Dick sci-fi novels like Eye in the Sky and Time Out of Joint. " Toni exclaimed.
"Good point. But at least the folks in those novels saw through the fantasy worlds they were initially trapped in. Perhaps we can do that too." Phil commented.
"But I mean, why is Thompson able to do this?"
"Yeah, well, we know why he's doing it. He's turned into a bulb-headed, bug-eyed mutant straight out of the pulps." Carla said, motioning toward a drawer where she kept her stash of pre-war keepsakes.
"I think we all know that. It's probably a result of the war. The potential was always within him." Amanda nodded.
"So he's used to living a lie, a facade, and so now he's found a way to force the rest of us to, as well?" Phil queried.
"That's the troubling part. People consented to this because they couldn't face what the world's really like now. Because otherwise, they'd have to acknowledge that the city is in ruins, that there are firing squads at the city limits and mass graves exist over the hills where they buried the folks that perished in the war. And that we're all sallow skinned, lank-haired and wearing tattered clothes. And that instead of fancy meals, we get fed endless spam and powdered black coffee rations." Toni remarked.
"Honey, you're only thirteen. You shouldn't have that degree of insight."
"Let's face it, Mandy, we all have. And actually, that could prove a benefit in some circumstances."
"Meaning?"
"Our heroes, the Justice Guild. They'd be sickened at the white bread eternal land of happiness that their cartoon images caper around and cavort in, they wouldn't want to be used like this."
"But the Guild died in the war. They died heroes, but that's all those four-color cardboard cutouts are- empty symbols of the past that no longer exist, form with no substance."
"Then what say we return the substance to them?"
ALAN'S DINER:
Love, love me do
You know I love you
So please, please, please,
Love me do...
As Ray Thompson heard the music echo out from the milk bar diner on Coventry Street, he frowned momentarily as the oblivious simulacra of Catman rode alongside him on his Catcycle. Then he reasserted his youthful facade, to preserve the myth that Ray Thompson was still the young adolescent that he masqueraded as and not a glowering malignant mutant with an engorged, throbbing cranium who had enslaved the people of this city. He modulated his Catman simulacra, who said: "Hey, sport, we must be having an Indian summer. Let's head over to that diner for some ice cream and coke." Thompson enacted his parody of a naive, enthusiastic ingenue, grateful and proud to be the 'mascot' of the World's Mightiest Mystery Men. He despised it, of course, but that minor sacrifice was part of the consensual hallucination that the war had never happened.
Except...
Except, there were now these tell-tale signs that it had, these eruptions of memory into consciousness and visibility. Take this "Beatles" recording, for example. The British band had been growing in popularity before the war. And that wasn't the only disturbance in the otherwise immaculate facade. There were flower corsages outside Elliot's Theater, where Marilyn Monroe's last completed film, The Misfits, was playing and alongside them, black bordered photographs of the actress. He particularly hadn't wanted attention paid to Monroe's death from drug overdose, it would mean that some people might be liable to abreact to the lotus eaters illusory world around them and form a nucleus of resistance. He could tolerate minor infringements of the prohibition of progress. That new children's cartoon, The Jetsons, was harmless enough, and the situation comedy, I Love Lucy, played on the perennial popularity of comedy queen Lucille Ball. But then again, that hitherto unsuspected French bakery had caused him momentary shock with its Paris-Match magazine celebration of President DeGaulle's survival of that assassination attempt. He had quickly shut it down, but other moments of unease were never far away. To the protests of the teenagers in the diner, a smiling paternalistic Catman confiscated and destroyed the record after he and Ray had left the building. As he watched Catman crush the record beneath his foot, he sighed with relief. Little did Ray Thompson know that there was method to this apparent madness and that it was not solely attributable to his own inexperience in mass hallucination casting.
RADIO WGSB:
But the next unwelcome incursion occurred when the radio station, WGSB, was conducting its latest interview with Catman and the Black Siren. At first, the happy smiling simulacra smiled and laughed while getting asked quotidian questions about their most fondly remembered crime fighting cases, before an advertising interlude when, unseen to Catman and the Black Siren, chloroform was placed over the mouth of the continuity announcer and Amanda took her place:
"This is Alison Metcalfe. I'm sorry, Rita Summerisle was called away on family business. Now, Catman and Black Siren, it's been six months since the death of your Justice Guild colleague Cassandra. What memories do you have of your time with her?" The oblivious animated holograms of Catman and Black Siren had their microphones surreptitiously turned off as they continued to smile and converse about other matters, only now, no-one could hear them. Amanda cut to a cartridge which contained a radio interview that had been recorded at the same time as Cassandra's death. It didn't take long for Ray Thompson to realise that something was amiss as the recordings from several months ago about his hated internal enemy played over the airwaves. He snarled with misshapen teeth as his hallucinatory facade of nine year old innocence faltered. He would not tolerate this act of sabotage, of treason, of sedition!
But by the time his telekinesis shattered the foundations of WGSB and caused a gaping hole to open up beneath the building, causing its broadcast to abruptly cease, the damage had been done. Quotes from the interviews with images of the city's guardians alongside them materialised on posters around the city and people began to talk. Not many, and Thompson quickly insured that they were made grisly examples of. People found that sudden heart attacks, suffocation or freak motor vehicle accidents could befall someone who made unwise statements about the 'rogue' radio news item. However, he adapted to the threat to his unseen authority and despotic presence by providing some opportunities for his troupe of action heroes to be seen fighting crime against some of their more habitual opponents. Given that the Injustice Guild hadn't been seen for months beforehand and might have escaped Seaboard City for a fallout shelter before the Cuban War broke out, Thompson had to resort to adversarial holographs of the supervillain association. But they seemed to work, using the lustre of the Justice Guild's heritage, reputation and charisma from their storied past to divert public attention from the sudden outbreaks of contradictory news and recent historical event memories into everyday life. Gradually, Thompson's confidence grew. However, he was uneasy at the absence of apprehension of these troublesome dissidents.
And then, in June, another shock occurred. Salvaging radiation suits, Phil and Carla had made their way to an abandoned radio telescope station several miles out of the city. By Carla's calculation, NASA's Mariner 2 spacecraft must have made its closest approach to Venus in late December 1962, and although Mission Control at Cape Canaveral or Houston were now just so many vaporised atoms drifting in the stratosphere, the blast that had hit Ryerson Air Force Base and destroyed Seaboard City and the Justice Guild was out of range of the relay station. And their reasoning paid off. The radio telescope had contained a reasonably intact record of the data that the NASA probe had harvested from its survey of that world.
And so, one day, a fanciful adapted sci-fi movie abruptly ended up doctored as the film started to depict actual atmospheric and surface conditions on Venus itself, sparing no detail of what it would 'really' be like for a descending crewed spacecraft and the grisly fate of anyone who made it to the hellish surface of Earth's nearest neighbour. That faithful depiction triggered memories of their own suppressed trauma from the Cuban War and there was rioting in the Griffith suburban streets outside for a week. Notably, the sanitised Times-Picayune made no reference to this act of open rebellion in Seaboard City's own streets, mere miles away and Ray Thompson wrought brutal and uncompromising revenge to this latest display of wildfire resistance to his rule.
EPILOGUE:
One wishes that this was a story of cumulative and mounting resistance, and a successful revolution that overthrew Ray Thompson's tyranny, but that's not what happened. Because, sadly, some people prefer comforting lies or collective delusion to challenging and unsettling truths. And thus, one moment of indiscretion caused a suspicious neighbour to betray Toni Prentice to the SCPD. Surreptitiously visiting her cell with the assistance of that collaborator, Thompson discovered the psi-null anomaly that all of his assailants shared, but not their names or identities. One wishes that Toni Prentice had been able to assassinate Ray Thompson in her cell, but that didn't happen either. But because she was a brave, loyal and courageous young woman, she bit down on a cyanide capsule and died before Thompson had a chance to torture her for information.
After that there is little archival Seaboard City data available about Carla Foccaro, Amanda Cinnamon or Philip Wilson. Their schoolmates and neighbours were bewildered when they failed to show up for high school or afternoon jobs. Their parents told curious GCPD and Department of Social Security community liaison workers that they were away visiting relatives in Boston- which was a lie, because a gaping radioactive crater now occupied the place where that city had been. But, because Thompson wanted to continue to project the illusion that the War had never happened and that Seaboard City was a nostalgic utopian fantasy world, he assumed that the three dissidents had died of cumulative radiation poisoning out in the wastelands beyond the city.
In this, as in so many other things, the tyrannical monster was wrong. Although Seaboard City data lacks any continued references, the same wasn't true in Canadian Security Intelligence Service records. Amanda, Phil and Carla reached the Canadian border and provided the CSIS with information in the fool's paradise enclave within Seaboard City. In time, Phil and Amanda married and had children, while Carla became a Catholic nun. And finally, thirty nine years after their battle of wits with Ray Thompson, they finally received the news that his poison-edged dreamland had fallen and that at the last moment, the once cliched carbon copies of the Justice Guild had become something more than nostalgic lies- they had become real heroes, rich in substance as the men and woman they depicted.
THE END [3.48 PM, MAY 30, 2024]
Here's one story...
+++
SEABOARD CITY, FEBRUARY 15, 1963:
Amanda Cinnamon was a strange girl. Truth to tell, if the war hadn't happened, she might have gone on to greater things, like a career in science akin to Seaboard City's own beloved Tom Tyrell (the Justice Guild's Tom Turbine), or become a brilliant journalist like Lyra Lewis. But the brutal nuclear holocaust that descended on the city on October 27, 1962 shattered and destroyed all such hopes. A well read young woman, Amanda possessed a particular ability that others would have longed for, except she kept it quiet. Hers was the gift of 'true sight', an ability to see through Ray Thompson's pastel romanticism and hallucinatory facade of an unchanging fantasy world. At times, what she saw in the real world beneath the ersatz confection made her stomach turn. The ruined buildings, roofless and walless apartments and houses, ramshackle beds, spam rations and the actual, shambling, unkempt and bewildered survivors around her broke her heart sometimes. It was tempting to submit to the illusion and pretend that you lived in a picture perfect golden age suburban world, full of laughing children, plenty and peace and light. Except she knew that this was all curated and manicured. Perhaps alone of her whole city, she was immune to his seductive nostalgia warp.
There were little quirks here and there that enabled her to keep her sanity. For example, Thompson's pathological hatred of Cassandra Astriides, the precognitive sixth member of the Justice Guild who had been erased from Seaboard City's post-apocalyptic memory by the vindictive mutant because alone of her comrades, she knew Thompson for what he was and would become and that his facade of childhood innocence would end with the war that he secretly longed for, even if it would mean the death of his feigned 'heroes', the Justice Guild of America. Slowly and stealthily, because her presence was untraceable by Ray Thompson, she collected artefacts of the brave Cassandra, magazine covers, buried plastic heroic figures, styled wigs, magnetic tape recordings. Thompson had thought that merely because he'd erased all visible signs of the hated heroine, people would simply forget her. In this, as in so many other things.
It was at a New Years Day party that she first realised that she was not alone. They had become anodyne affairs, purged of troublesome historical markers and with only vague memories of half-remembered current affairs. Not even the fact that the war year had ended on December 31, 1962 was acknowledged by anyone. 1963 was left off the readjusted calendars and only months were permitted. Only photographic images of the rest of the United States were permitted, strictly as it had been before the Cuban missile crisis had metastasised into the Third World War. And then Phil Dawson surprised her by whispering: "Happy 1963, Mandy..."
At first she thought she'd been hearing things. But by the end of the party, she'd seen several other markers of the forbidden mention of the new year. Carla Foccario handed her a cupcake with the Roman digits MCMLXIII on it- 1963. Even Toni Prentice, who wouldn't say boo to a goose, handed her a note with the numbers 1.1.63 on it. As they waited for their parents to drive them home, Phil and Carla motioned to her. She checked that none of the lotus eaters around them noticed, but no-one did. And so, telephoning her mother, she told her that Carla would give her a lift home later and that they were working on a homework assignment together. And because this world didn't have lover's lanes or flirting or romantic encounters at drive-ins, her mother accepted her daughter's story.
"So, what gives? I take it the rest of you are like me. That we all know that there's been a war, that Seaboard City got hit, and that somehow, all of us can resist Ray Thompson's mind control."
Carla nodded: "It's such an effort trying to pretend everything is all sunlit and normal when it isn't. Have you noticed? Anyone who resists Thompson gets killed in their tracks, even something as innocent as a direct reference to something that occurred during last year. Except for us. He isn't aware that we exist."
"It's like one of those Phillip K. Dick sci-fi novels like Eye in the Sky and Time Out of Joint. " Toni exclaimed.
"Good point. But at least the folks in those novels saw through the fantasy worlds they were initially trapped in. Perhaps we can do that too." Phil commented.
"But I mean, why is Thompson able to do this?"
"Yeah, well, we know why he's doing it. He's turned into a bulb-headed, bug-eyed mutant straight out of the pulps." Carla said, motioning toward a drawer where she kept her stash of pre-war keepsakes.
"I think we all know that. It's probably a result of the war. The potential was always within him." Amanda nodded.
"So he's used to living a lie, a facade, and so now he's found a way to force the rest of us to, as well?" Phil queried.
"That's the troubling part. People consented to this because they couldn't face what the world's really like now. Because otherwise, they'd have to acknowledge that the city is in ruins, that there are firing squads at the city limits and mass graves exist over the hills where they buried the folks that perished in the war. And that we're all sallow skinned, lank-haired and wearing tattered clothes. And that instead of fancy meals, we get fed endless spam and powdered black coffee rations." Toni remarked.
"Honey, you're only thirteen. You shouldn't have that degree of insight."
"Let's face it, Mandy, we all have. And actually, that could prove a benefit in some circumstances."
"Meaning?"
"Our heroes, the Justice Guild. They'd be sickened at the white bread eternal land of happiness that their cartoon images caper around and cavort in, they wouldn't want to be used like this."
"But the Guild died in the war. They died heroes, but that's all those four-color cardboard cutouts are- empty symbols of the past that no longer exist, form with no substance."
"Then what say we return the substance to them?"
ALAN'S DINER:
Love, love me do
You know I love you
So please, please, please,
Love me do...
As Ray Thompson heard the music echo out from the milk bar diner on Coventry Street, he frowned momentarily as the oblivious simulacra of Catman rode alongside him on his Catcycle. Then he reasserted his youthful facade, to preserve the myth that Ray Thompson was still the young adolescent that he masqueraded as and not a glowering malignant mutant with an engorged, throbbing cranium who had enslaved the people of this city. He modulated his Catman simulacra, who said: "Hey, sport, we must be having an Indian summer. Let's head over to that diner for some ice cream and coke." Thompson enacted his parody of a naive, enthusiastic ingenue, grateful and proud to be the 'mascot' of the World's Mightiest Mystery Men. He despised it, of course, but that minor sacrifice was part of the consensual hallucination that the war had never happened.
Except...
Except, there were now these tell-tale signs that it had, these eruptions of memory into consciousness and visibility. Take this "Beatles" recording, for example. The British band had been growing in popularity before the war. And that wasn't the only disturbance in the otherwise immaculate facade. There were flower corsages outside Elliot's Theater, where Marilyn Monroe's last completed film, The Misfits, was playing and alongside them, black bordered photographs of the actress. He particularly hadn't wanted attention paid to Monroe's death from drug overdose, it would mean that some people might be liable to abreact to the lotus eaters illusory world around them and form a nucleus of resistance. He could tolerate minor infringements of the prohibition of progress. That new children's cartoon, The Jetsons, was harmless enough, and the situation comedy, I Love Lucy, played on the perennial popularity of comedy queen Lucille Ball. But then again, that hitherto unsuspected French bakery had caused him momentary shock with its Paris-Match magazine celebration of President DeGaulle's survival of that assassination attempt. He had quickly shut it down, but other moments of unease were never far away. To the protests of the teenagers in the diner, a smiling paternalistic Catman confiscated and destroyed the record after he and Ray had left the building. As he watched Catman crush the record beneath his foot, he sighed with relief. Little did Ray Thompson know that there was method to this apparent madness and that it was not solely attributable to his own inexperience in mass hallucination casting.
RADIO WGSB:
But the next unwelcome incursion occurred when the radio station, WGSB, was conducting its latest interview with Catman and the Black Siren. At first, the happy smiling simulacra smiled and laughed while getting asked quotidian questions about their most fondly remembered crime fighting cases, before an advertising interlude when, unseen to Catman and the Black Siren, chloroform was placed over the mouth of the continuity announcer and Amanda took her place:
"This is Alison Metcalfe. I'm sorry, Rita Summerisle was called away on family business. Now, Catman and Black Siren, it's been six months since the death of your Justice Guild colleague Cassandra. What memories do you have of your time with her?" The oblivious animated holograms of Catman and Black Siren had their microphones surreptitiously turned off as they continued to smile and converse about other matters, only now, no-one could hear them. Amanda cut to a cartridge which contained a radio interview that had been recorded at the same time as Cassandra's death. It didn't take long for Ray Thompson to realise that something was amiss as the recordings from several months ago about his hated internal enemy played over the airwaves. He snarled with misshapen teeth as his hallucinatory facade of nine year old innocence faltered. He would not tolerate this act of sabotage, of treason, of sedition!
But by the time his telekinesis shattered the foundations of WGSB and caused a gaping hole to open up beneath the building, causing its broadcast to abruptly cease, the damage had been done. Quotes from the interviews with images of the city's guardians alongside them materialised on posters around the city and people began to talk. Not many, and Thompson quickly insured that they were made grisly examples of. People found that sudden heart attacks, suffocation or freak motor vehicle accidents could befall someone who made unwise statements about the 'rogue' radio news item. However, he adapted to the threat to his unseen authority and despotic presence by providing some opportunities for his troupe of action heroes to be seen fighting crime against some of their more habitual opponents. Given that the Injustice Guild hadn't been seen for months beforehand and might have escaped Seaboard City for a fallout shelter before the Cuban War broke out, Thompson had to resort to adversarial holographs of the supervillain association. But they seemed to work, using the lustre of the Justice Guild's heritage, reputation and charisma from their storied past to divert public attention from the sudden outbreaks of contradictory news and recent historical event memories into everyday life. Gradually, Thompson's confidence grew. However, he was uneasy at the absence of apprehension of these troublesome dissidents.
And then, in June, another shock occurred. Salvaging radiation suits, Phil and Carla had made their way to an abandoned radio telescope station several miles out of the city. By Carla's calculation, NASA's Mariner 2 spacecraft must have made its closest approach to Venus in late December 1962, and although Mission Control at Cape Canaveral or Houston were now just so many vaporised atoms drifting in the stratosphere, the blast that had hit Ryerson Air Force Base and destroyed Seaboard City and the Justice Guild was out of range of the relay station. And their reasoning paid off. The radio telescope had contained a reasonably intact record of the data that the NASA probe had harvested from its survey of that world.
And so, one day, a fanciful adapted sci-fi movie abruptly ended up doctored as the film started to depict actual atmospheric and surface conditions on Venus itself, sparing no detail of what it would 'really' be like for a descending crewed spacecraft and the grisly fate of anyone who made it to the hellish surface of Earth's nearest neighbour. That faithful depiction triggered memories of their own suppressed trauma from the Cuban War and there was rioting in the Griffith suburban streets outside for a week. Notably, the sanitised Times-Picayune made no reference to this act of open rebellion in Seaboard City's own streets, mere miles away and Ray Thompson wrought brutal and uncompromising revenge to this latest display of wildfire resistance to his rule.
EPILOGUE:
One wishes that this was a story of cumulative and mounting resistance, and a successful revolution that overthrew Ray Thompson's tyranny, but that's not what happened. Because, sadly, some people prefer comforting lies or collective delusion to challenging and unsettling truths. And thus, one moment of indiscretion caused a suspicious neighbour to betray Toni Prentice to the SCPD. Surreptitiously visiting her cell with the assistance of that collaborator, Thompson discovered the psi-null anomaly that all of his assailants shared, but not their names or identities. One wishes that Toni Prentice had been able to assassinate Ray Thompson in her cell, but that didn't happen either. But because she was a brave, loyal and courageous young woman, she bit down on a cyanide capsule and died before Thompson had a chance to torture her for information.
After that there is little archival Seaboard City data available about Carla Foccaro, Amanda Cinnamon or Philip Wilson. Their schoolmates and neighbours were bewildered when they failed to show up for high school or afternoon jobs. Their parents told curious GCPD and Department of Social Security community liaison workers that they were away visiting relatives in Boston- which was a lie, because a gaping radioactive crater now occupied the place where that city had been. But, because Thompson wanted to continue to project the illusion that the War had never happened and that Seaboard City was a nostalgic utopian fantasy world, he assumed that the three dissidents had died of cumulative radiation poisoning out in the wastelands beyond the city.
In this, as in so many other things, the tyrannical monster was wrong. Although Seaboard City data lacks any continued references, the same wasn't true in Canadian Security Intelligence Service records. Amanda, Phil and Carla reached the Canadian border and provided the CSIS with information in the fool's paradise enclave within Seaboard City. In time, Phil and Amanda married and had children, while Carla became a Catholic nun. And finally, thirty nine years after their battle of wits with Ray Thompson, they finally received the news that his poison-edged dreamland had fallen and that at the last moment, the once cliched carbon copies of the Justice Guild had become something more than nostalgic lies- they had become real heroes, rich in substance as the men and woman they depicted.
THE END [3.48 PM, MAY 30, 2024]