Minister Faust by From (html) (best ereader for pdf txt) 📗

the Specially Relative Einstein Baboons and Cosmicus, Digester of Worlds. He returned to his role in our realm as our greatest thinker. As our greatest teacher. In the ancient sense of the word, as our Master.

“Now, everybody always thought Hawk King was Hawk King only, without any secret identity. But everybody was wrong.”

The crowd fluttered and whispered at X-Man’s implication of secrets about to be scattered, like a swarm of pigeons squawking in anticipation of ripped-up hoagie buns.

“As a celestial being,” said Kareem, “Hawk King was physically powerful. But when he lived among us in his hidden role as a human, he did so in a frail body. Withered. Old. An aged invalid in a motorized wheelchair who in the last few years of his life couldn’t even talk. Had to have a voice-synthesizing computer do it for him.

“The man inside Hawk King was a brilliant scientist and professor—an archeologist, a cosmologist. Taught at Robeson College in Langston-Douglas for the last forty years. His name was Dr. Jacob George James ‘Jackson’ Rogers. He was my mentor.

“And Dr. Jackson Rogers—Hawk King—was a black man.”

Gasps and guffaws shot up like spontaneous sprinkler sprays on a golf green, with one man in the front row a geyser.

“How dare you!” shouted Mr. Piltdown, standing and aiming his finger at the X-Man as if it were an avenging foil.

“Hawk King wanted big changes,” Kareem sped on, “huge changes in the F*O*O*J! He gave me all his final papyri—specific directions on how and what to do, to overhaul the F*O*O*J and change the direction our planet’s going—”

“Shut your mouth, you reprobate rascal! We are here to honor our greatest hero, not listen to your crack-induced bafflegab—”

“—seeing what the F*O*O*J had become broke his heart, and he had a plan, a plan to completely revolutionize the group! One week from today I will reveal the contents of The Instructions of Hawk King, his final papyrus, detailing—”

“—dare you sully this holy day with your selfish, delusional election grandstanding and your bizarre negroist fantasies?”

“Don’t be accusing me of electioneering, Mr. Two-Hour ‘I Was Hawk King’s Bestest Friend Ever’ Eulogizing Crypto-fascist, who owns the only TV network allowed to shoot in here! And don’be doubting who Hawk King was, Pilly, ’cause I’ve got proof! Including the fact that Dr. Rogers went missing the day before Hawk King was found dead!”

Mr. Piltdown hustled onto the platform and toward the podium. The PNN cameras moved with him. “Get off there, now! You’re done, Edgerton, you hear me?”

Kareem held up his hands, fingers splayed, saying something inaudible while the Flying Squirrel kept rushing toward him. X-Man leaned into the microphone, saying, “What, you gonna throw down right here in the middle of a—”

Mr. Piltdown’s left fist slammed into Kareem’s belly hard enough to double him over, whereupon his right fist smashed X-Man’s face upward and back. Reeling from the uppercut, Kareem swung blindly, missing Mr. Piltdown’s cheek by half a foot, but his second fist connected with the older man’s throat. The PNN cameras caught it all.

All around me, men and women were scrambling into action, battle lines gashed by race and/or generation. Members of the L*A*B, the Supa Soul Sistas, the Asian Invaders, MAMBO, and the Merry Men were deep-ending into the melee against F*O*O*Jsters such as the Beaver Brothers, the Newt, the Evolutionist, and independent heroes such as Ivory Giant, Smithing Wesson, and the fifty-three-year-old Kid Kombat, Sr.

Folding chairs and chunks of burning sod ascended and descended like a convention of locusts; Messers Clinton, Annan, and Pinolawi were escorted out under guard through a chorus of swearing, screaming, and pleas for calm, with Jack Zenith leaving under the protection of his civilian-clothed protégé, the former Chip Monk.

Countless heroes waded into the dustup, trying to separate the combatants. Extraneous Man and Cumulus Maximus formed a fog-and-flesh barrier while the sickle-and-hammercaped Son of Soyuz flew left and right, biting people’s bottoms, wagging his little tail furiously and barking at them to stop—

When suddenly the sky collapsed from an embolism.

Raging overhead, blotting out the sun, were what must have been millions of hawks, their screeching choir sounding like the world being buzzsawed apart, their wings somehow transforming the remainders of the sky into an awful anguished violet saturating the earth and everything else beneath them.

And then three bolts of lighting—amber, ruby, and emerald bolts of dazzling energy—pulverized the stage and the podium into smithereenlets.

All combatants jumped back from whomever they were pummeling or rolled away from whoever was pummeling them, crouching and quivering at the sight of the lightning, which had struck and remained in place. The bolts snapped and twisted and finally congealed into the black-light forms of three titans: a giant with the face of a jackal, another with the face of a flamingo, and a female giant holding what looked like a massive feather.

The Jackal stooped, gently picking up the sarcophagus of Hawk King and cradling it like a baby. The Woman pointed her feather like a lance, panning it across the crowd.

And then the Flamingo took each comrade by the hand, and the triumvirate transmuted themselves back into lightning.

And disappeared.

Peace Is Not Simply the Absence of War

Funerals are emotionally dynamic experiences, and even nonpowered humans may find themselves reacting in ways that frustrate or embarrass themselves and others: excessive sobbing, laughter, panic attacks, and incontinence, among many other overreactions, are common.

But for you in the superpowered community, careening through high-stakes careers and hobbled by overactive ids and the Icon Trap, outbursts and even violence at funerals are practically an occupational hazard.

To get a better understanding of how my sanity-supplicants were faring during this uniquely stressful time, I chose to observe them outside the clinical environment, seeking them out on their own turf where they’d be more able to process and safely/appropriately externalize/verbalize their psychemotional disturbances.

While a few of my patients retired postfunereally to the Fortress of Freedom, most made their way to a well-known eatery in midtown Bird Island, a cramped enclave on Bustle Avenue famous for its