Crux & Anomaly: Issue #1 (602 hits)
Category: NoneRating: 2 on 12 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by TaK (View user info) at 2005-02-22 22:18:44 EST
Hey Uber, like comics? No? Then kiss my ass and fuck a cheese grater. Yes? You do? Then check this out.
I have no idea why I'm doing this, it's 10:15 on a Tuesday night and I know this won't get read, but I'm tired of not sharing my writing so here goes:
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IMAGINE THE WORLD OF A MAN LOST FROM THE MAN HE WAS!
IMAGINE THE WORLD OF A MAN TRANSFORMED AGAINST HIS WILL INTO A BEING OF UNIMAGINABLE STRENGTH!
IMAGINE THE COLD AND DESOLATE FEELING OF REMEMBERING NO ONE YOU LOVE!
IMAGINE BECOMING WHAT YOU'VE ALWAYS DREAMED, BUT AT THE EXPENSE OF EVERYTHING YOU'VE EVER HAD!
IMAGINE THESE THINGS AND YOU WILL BE ONE STEP CLOSER TO THE REALITY OF TaK's, AND THE WORLD'S, NEWEST HERO SERIES...
CRUX & ANOMALY!
ISSUE #1 - A Severed Man
I haven't always been this way.
Somehow I know that, although my memories of only a week ago are muddled; they taper and pinch off like a well-behaved shit at ten days back. The only exception is the vision or freed memory or whatever you want to call it that I was given by my dump-mate. My dump-mate whom I'm positive now is not of this world.
Let me explain.
The first thing I can remember is awaking in this dumpster, the front of my shirt soiled and smelling of puke, a bottle of cheap malt liquor cradled in my crotch. Apparently the dumpster isn't used anymore. Why it hasn't been picked up and taken to the Old Dumpster Home or whatever I have no idea, but so far it's been the only thing I've had to be grateful or happy about. It's love that makes a home after all, even if your "home" isn't exactly a "house".
You can dig that I'm sure.
I'm sure you can also dig that a hung over wake up in an empty dumpster with car horns and screeching tires bouncing back and forth across your face and the stench of your own puke and urine practically burning your nose hairs away can be enough to make a man reach for the bottle. BUT! Try piling on top of that going to sleep as one person in one place and waking up not only as a different person in a different place but without even remembering where or as who you laid down your head! Try all that on for size! See if your tongue all of a sudden doesn't learn a yearning for some sweet amber!
Can you get behind all that? Sure you can. And that's without the whole Super Hero thing thrown in! But we'll get to that in a minute, I'm getting ahead of myself.
Like I said, I woke up in (my/our) the dumpster, not knowing I was in a dumpster, not knowing where I was or who I was or where I'd been or how I'd gotten so miserably hung over. The empty bottle was a hint, but beyond the bottle and my dirty clothes there was nothing. Had I always been a bum? Had I always been a drunk? Where the fuck was I, and why did it sound and feel as if I were lying in a trash bin?
Ah, I was lying in a trash bin.
This led to the problem of getting out of the damn thing, which seemed easy in thought but in practice proved to be a pain in my dirty hobo ass. My legs buckled when I tried to stand, and lifting my arms was like trying to move the world with faith. I began to cry after my second attempt, wishing I were dead, feeling awash in the mess of it all and a million miles from anywhere that made any sense.
But through my tears I saw the dumpster's lid creak open and a tiny prick of light fall inside. The car horns grew in my ears and I met, yet again, the reason behind my vicious hangover and subsequent slumber atop a rotten pile of left over clothes and left over food.
"Oh, you're awake now eh? Good. 'Bout time."
The dumpster lid flew all the way open and some of the trash, warm from my sleep, flew up, up, and away. You'll get that eventually. Everything's eventual.
I squinted my eyes and tried to make out who was talking to me, but there was nobody there. At first I thought maybe the dimness of the dumpster had made me temporarily blind in the sunlight, but when the gray edges disappeared from my vision there was still nothing but an empty alley's brick wall and the open dumpster lid to help me out.
"Where are you? Where'd ya go?" I tried to ask, but all that came out was something like the croak of a frog. Apparently it was intelligible enough though, or my new friend understood Frog, because the response was quick.
"I'm right here. Get used to it," the voice spoke, coming from a point behind and slightly to the right of my head. "Christ, you really gunked up my entire terrain this time Crux. I'm powering up and running a full system scan. Why don't you sit tight for a sec', we'll be ready to move out once we recover from your hangover."
She went on in a mumble about not being able to get drunk but suffering the consequences, and yes, I could tell it was a female. Not because of her voice, I wasn't really hearing her voice. It was in my head; I could sense its softness, feel its rounded curves. I hadn't seen her because she was in me. I wondered if she was attractive, but really, how does one wonder about such things?
I began a thought about how she had managed to open the dumpster if she wasn't physically there, but had no time to complete it. I found my attention drawn inexorably elsewhere.
In front of my eyes, almost as if it were a part of my eyes grown out and projected in the air before me, floated the three dimensional image of what I knew to be a computer screen. I had used computers before, though I couldn't remember where or for what reason. I did recall that they were nothing like this thing in front of me.
At first there was a green globe covered in words I couldn't read set against a black and white grid that stretched back and out on all sides for about a foot. Two hands appeared in the image (lady fingers, long nails painted with white and black swirls that matched the grid) and began to spin the globe, searching for something particular.
As the globe spun on its axis there came a swatch of it that looked burned or rusted, veins of brown running off from a central splash of black that reminded me of a cancer.
The hands found the panel they had been looking for and pressed against the globes surface, causing the whole thing to zoom in and my head to feel like the rotten vegetables I had laid on and burst with my sleeping weight. I tried to ask what that big brown spot had been, but she answered before I finished the thought again. That was going to take some getting used to.
"How many times am I going to have to repeat myself," she answered, "before you stop asking? That's the section of our brain that Brax infected with his death, most likely in order to hit you where it hurt."
"Where it h-..."
"Yes, where it hurt. Namely your past. Your nostalgia. Your memor-..." she trailed off, and then: "PRECIOUS MEMORIES!" she screamed, maniacal, breaking into a full singing voice, "HOW THEY LINGER...HOW THEY EVER FLOOD MY SO...OO...UL! AS I TRAVEL ON LIFE'S PATHWAYS, PRECIOUS MEMORIES DO I HOLD!"
The voice was loud enough to wrack my head back and forth, though it wasn't loud in an aural sense. Was this woman, or thing, or whatever, insane? I stuffed that thought to the back of my brain as quickly as possible, afraid she may see or "hear" me thinking again, but she was evidently too wrapped up in finishing the sentence she had begun as if there had been no interruption. My thought passed under the radar.
"...and probably some of your family or at least where you were before the blank spots. Either way, it looks like we have a while before we're operational again; I still have to get your legs working. Why don't you just nod back and enjoy the in flight movie. The only thing is we'll be sitting, not flying. And in a dumpster, not a plane. But, these few memories I preserved always seem to cheer you up."
The hands hanging in the air before me pressed down again, and the world disappeared; the green of the globe expanded to fill all of my vision, I was lifted from the ground above a scene that rendered much like a computer would a graphic. Each piece fell in place and I remembered them all one by one.
There were green walls and a green and white tiled floor that I recalled tile by tile as they flew in and settled like wingless doves. There were the equally green curtains covering the windows which I remembered after their cover fully rendered; those windows I knew, though I could not see them, wore a grid like the green globe. These were more tangible though; they were made of rough iron bars. There was a bedside table and a phone on top and a bible in the drawer. Last there was a bed and its occupant.
The lady flew in on a wire and filled in before me, while my brain recalled that the woman was my mother. She was dying.
I stood beside her bed and watched her seep away like blood on the sheets, and I knew that I was ten years old and I was going to stop my mothers death, I was going to kill the cancer, eat the cancer, make it me, make it gone, make it dead, make it still, and as if it were all happening again instead of being remembered I reached out my hand and bent my forehead towards the bed, my veins roaring, bending my mind towards her rotten lungs, grabbing hold of the cancer with my eyes and reeling it in like a fish, sucking it up through a straw; it felt like crying but in reverse, the cancer bleeding out of my mother and crying into my eyes in torrents and floods, the pain like none I'd ever known, my mothers flesh turning pink and drinking blood again, looking healthy, looking clean, and my skin going black, cracking up, bleeding out, falling off, falling away.
I fell from the bed, knowing my mother would live, and the memory came to an abrupt end. The world of the nursing home dissolved and the dumpster's innards solidified around me again. The green globe and its black and white grid reappeared, revolving slowly as the world turns.
I reached my hand to my aching head and it came away sticky and red like the cover of a candy apple. I remembered taking the sick from my mother and wearing it like a second skin, but I could not remember the shape of her face.
"Do you remember me now?" the lady's voice asked, "Sometimes these memory shots jog your...well, memory."
"No, I'm sorry I -..."
"Right, right. My name's Anomaly. I'm your faithful onboard construct, though I'm a bit different in design than your normal, run of the mill program...aaaand of course there's the part about how I may have once been much more to you than just a sidekick, but hey what's important right now is the first-name-basis thing, so HI! I'm Anomaly and your Crux, are you ready to go?"
"Ready to go wh-..."
"Right! Great! We're off!"
And with that, the hands in the 3D vision before me reached out and grasped the globe on both sides, gave it a hurried spin, and the whole works disappeared. In its place rose to the right of my peripheral vision a stack of tiny bars shaded blue, and on the left what appeared to be a circular tracking device or map. In the center of my sight was a small picture of an eye, and beside it, the number 156.
I had played video games before, though I couldn't remember where or why. I thought I had a pretty good idea of what I was seeing though, and in return, where this all was going.
Before I could get used to the idea, the computer in my head (what had she said her name was? Anomaly?) gave out a banshee cry and I was lifted straight up into the air (up, up, and away) for what seemed like a mile, two miles, three.
I lost consciousness and, until my next awakening, knew no more.
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JOIN US NEXT TIME FOR MORE ON THE CRUX OF A MAN!
FIND OUT MORE ABOUT CRUX AND HIS CONSTRUCT ANOMALY IN THE NEXT INSTALLMENT:
ISSUE #2, "Coming To Terms"!!!
User Reviews
Submitted by Anansie (user info) at 2005-04-17 00:36:19 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I'm drunk. On the off chance you see this, hey, bitch. Have a +2.
Submitted by KillWomen (user info) at 2005-02-25 20:48:02 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
I want cheese.
Oh, and this didn't suck.
Submitted by LadyPlural (user info) at 2005-02-25 20:30:04 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
I like it.
Submitted by Phinch (user info) at 2005-02-23 19:10:37 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Don't try to back out now Sideburns. I will find you and give you cheese!
Submitted by Sideburns (user info) at 2005-02-23 15:21:38 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Just in case it wasn't obvious, I was being sarcastic in my review, Phinch. I figured you wouldn't get any business from that kind of advertising, especially with mail.
Submitted by Phinch (user info) at 2005-02-23 11:42:19 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Just read it.
Kick ass. I'm looking forward to the next installment.
Sideburns- I quit. But I put in a good word for you, and I think he'll toss you some cheddar once he makes some profit. Of course it might literally be a stick of cheddar cheese, as the business isn't exactly breaking even.
Submitted by loki (user info) at 2005-02-23 11:16:08 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
ok, I'm in.
Submitted by drfeggphd (user info) at 2005-02-23 09:32:42 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
awesomeness
Submitted by Durae (user info) at 2005-02-23 08:52:25 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by Sideburns (user info) at 2005-02-23 04:10:42 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Phinch is going to ask you to do the marketing for one of his business ideas, then come up short when you want your money from the profits.
Submitted by Phinch (user info) at 2005-02-23 01:01:06 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
tak email me.
phinch.at.gmail.com
Submitted by loki (user info) at 2005-02-22 23:26:01 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
This is just a preliminary +2 because I'm going to bed right now and can't get sucked into this. I'm going to read this tomorrow and pitch a bloody fit if it sucks.