by Dan Swanson
Read the next sentence as fast as you can:
Daggers of fire seared her optic nerves she was falling bit back a scream of pain echolocation signals stopped started slamming into her she twisted to land flat her stomach lurched with nausea rolled into shelter her brain was just starting to catch up.
Ghast the Ghostly Avenger’s hyper-acute senses were screaming at her. Before her mind could react, her hair-trigger reflexes forced her to drop to the floor. As she was falling, her body caught up to the changes around her, attacking her with a blast of nausea like violent sea sickness. She was retching when she hit the floor, but her mind was working at computer speed, already integrating the reports from her eight senses into a detailed mental picture of her new surroundings.
She found himself a small bedroom; echo-location gave her the exact dimensions. There were folded linens on the mattress and women’s clothing hanging behind the partially open closet door. The woman who lived here favored the scent of roses. It was daylight outside; she thought it might be late afternoon. There was a dresser with open drawers, topped with a jewelry box, and piles of cardboard boxes, some empty and some still unopened. Ignoring the convulsive spasms of her stomach, she rolled to the wall next to the dresser. In this slightly less exposed position, she stopped to consider her options.
The Ghast had appeared here, wherever here was, in front of a full-length mirror. In her short glimpse of herself before she’d hit the floor, she’d noted nothing unusual, except that she was again wearing the cowl and cape, which she’d abandoned only seconds ago — and, of course, she was no longer in battle. A little more mental and mystical probing indicated that there were no living creatures in the house larger than the family of mice that lived in the basement. Somehow she had escaped from her enemies. There seemed to be no danger, but she didn’t relax. She still had no idea how she’d gotten here; perhaps there was a trap and she just hadn’t sprung it yet. She could discern no traces of her recent adversaries, their devastated battlefield, or her teammates.
Teammates? Bah! she sneered silently. I’m better off without them. I’ll assume I’m safe, at least for a while, was her cautious assessment. I need a little time to think.
Her mind working with computer-like precision, she examined the last few seconds of her memory for clues to her current situation. Almost instantly she knew what a fool she’d been, and how incredibly lucky she was to be here at all. That’s it! When I unthinkingly jettisoned my cowl to escape, I ceased existing. Which means… someone else was foolish enough to don the cowl!
The eidolic evildoer knew she wasn’t real; she was a costume wearing a person, a character from a role playing game given a semblance of life by a powerful, ancient black magic curse. Shortly after she and her team, the Jailbirds and Legbreakers Assembly, had appeared on this Earth (she recognized several of the heroes in the picture of the Super Squad, so she assumed that this was indeed the same Earth upon which she’d earlier appeared), she’d deduced that she and the JLA weren’t real — they were fictional villainous characters from some kind of super-hero role playing game played on this Earth, animated by some powerful, ancient curse, and the magic that sustained each of them resided in their costumes.
In my case, my cowl, she thought with chagrin. It even changed the gender of my last host body to male. I warned the others never to remove their costumes. And yet, I was the one who banished herself!
The magic that animated her resided in her cowl; in actuality, she existed only when someone was wearing this cowl and the attached cape. The spell transformed the unfortunate victim into the evil supervillain known as the Ghast — and the ghostly revenger would instantly cease to exist if the cowl was removed. She’d known that, and yet, in the heat of battle, she’d reacted instinctively to almost being captured by the androids by unthinkingly abandoning her cape and cowl, and the magic that was the Ghast had returned to the cowl. Just seconds ago, someone must have donned the cowl — and brought her back to life.
The Ghast had survived among her much more powerful teammates by careful planning, perfect execution, and by never making a mistake. Releasing her cowl without thinking had been exactly the kind of mistake she had trained her whole life to avoid, and she never made careless mistakes — or, at least, her magically animated memories told her that she didn’t. How much of what she knew about herself and the world was magically animated fiction?
She had no memory of the time she’d been away. She thought her memories of the battle at the League of United Nations and the encounter between the Super Squad and her associates, the Jailbirds and Legbreakers Assembly, were real memories, but when she’d first been brought to life, hadn’t she had memories then, too, that seemed real? Which were real memories, and which were magical constructs?
“I’d better learn a lot about this world in a hurry! And if I want to remain ‘alive,’ I had better secure my survival!” she barely whispered. Pulling a tool from her utility belt, she carefully destroyed the quick-release mechanism in the clasp for her cowl and cape. “This cowl won’t come off again without a fight!” she vowed.
Still, the Ghast was shaken by the mistake she’d made in removing her cape, despite knowing the consequences would be deadly. She needed to discover how much of what she knew, both of herself and the world, she could trust. She started with the things she could test. Closing her eyes, she walked around the untidy room, easily avoiding the piles of boxes and stopping inches from the walls, never experiencing any differences between what she sensed and the actuality of the room. Her echolocation worked exactly as she expected it to.
Then she verified that her life-sense worked. Searching the house, she found no other occupants except the family of mice she had sensed earlier, hiding in their lair exactly where she expected them to be. She could sense people outside the house; by looking out the window, she verified that they were where her sense said they should be. It was harder to verify her mystical senses; they seemed stronger than she remembered, but how could she tell if things in the trunk really had a magical aura, or if she was somehow just imagining it? The auras of some of those items seemed to be dangerous. She decided that she would tentatively accept what her mystical senses told her, but not trust them until she had other opportunities to test them.
She did some acrobatics in the mostly empty living room, performing some of the most complex and difficult stunts she could remember, with ease. The body she was inhabiting was initially stiff and inflexible, and she gasped in pain at her initial actions, but her healing factor quickly adapted her body to her exertions. She gritted her teeth and smashed a finger with a hammer, shattering the bone. She felt the pain and was able to withstand it, and within a few minutes the shattered bone had knit and the finger was healed. Yes, what she remembered about her physical capabilities seemed to be accurate.
Again, she tentatively decided to accept her own memories of herself and her physical capabilities, but to not trust any capability she hadn’t verified, and to use every opportunity to test herself.
By now she felt an interesting sensation in her stomach. It must be hunger, she decided; she couldn’t recall ever actually being hungry before. When she found food in the kitchen, she also discovered that she had never prepared food before. Fortunately, cans usually had instructions that she could figure out, and she verified something else she knew about himself (she learned new things very quickly). She was almost overwhelmed by the sensory sensations produced by her sense of smell. It seemed to be excellent, but she had no idea what she was smelling; it was very difficult to translate the sensation of smell to verbal description. She tried to train herself as she used the kitchen, sampling the scents of every item that had a label, or that she recognized. Food was similar; she’d never actually tasted anything before. Various foods produced strong reaction of like and dislike; she particularly enjoyed the small green balls that seemed to be composed of tightly wrapped leaves.
Over the next few hours, she studied diligently, reading everything in the house that she could find, from the old newspapers wrapping the stuff in the black trunk, to the labels of cans and bottles in the kitchen, to all the magazines and books in the house. In the midst of all this reading, she suddenly realized that she was thinking of herself as female, though she’d been male in her last incarnation.
I guess my gender is as fictional as the rest of me. I really need to get a copy of that cursed damn game! She shrugged and returned to her reading. To a fictional ghost animated only by magic, existing only as long as it had a host body, how important should or could gender be, after all?
Finally, she began to plan her future, considering the most obvious issue first. “For a while, at least, I’ll need to move around in public and not be recognized. It will require a superb disguise to pass unnoticed in public wearing a cape and cowl. Shouldn’t be a problem.” For some reason, she was very confident that she was a superb disguise artist.
***
The next afternoon, this short article appeared on the front page of the Local section of the Norwalk Hour newspaper:
Two unusual robberies were reported in Norwalk last night. Books, newspapers and magazines were reported stolen from the Boundaries Book Store on the Boston Post Road, and the entire sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica and Encyclopedia Americana for 1984 were stolen from the downtown branch of Norwalk Public Library.
“If the thief hadn’t smashed the locked glass display case in the Role-Playing row, we wouldn’t have even noticed anything missing,” reported Lynda Hart, the Manager of Boundaries. “Whoever it was seems to be a big fan of the superheroic role playing game ‘SuperYou’. Manuals, player and game master guides, playable scenarios, walkthroughs, fan magazines, supplements, graphic novels, what have you. One copy of each was missing, but the other games hadn’t been touched. Then one of the clerks noticed that we were missing some magazines and foreign newspapers. We’re still counting inventory, but so far we’ve discovered that the thief also took some books — history, political science, physical science — but only one copy of each of those as well.”
“It seems strange that someone would take ‘SuperYou’ materials,” Hart added. “It’s really the grandfather of role-playing games, been around since the ’60s, and we lost more material last night than we sell in six months. Maybe that’s a clue.”
Hart also reported that the intruder had expertly disabled the alarm system, and then restored it upon leaving.
Police say that the M.O. at the Norwalk Public Library was similar. The alarm was disabled and restored, and only the two encyclopedias appear to have been taken. Other than the smashed display case, there was no property damage.
There were no reported eyewitnesses to either crime. As of press time, the NPD has no suspects. NPD Chief Chris Habanski declined to speculate whether the two unusual thefts might be related. Habanski asked that any citizen who noticed anything unusual last night to please report it to the police.
***
On another plane of existence, no more than a sad, searing teardrop away from our own, a demi-demon born of demoness and one of the greatest human wizards of all time sat on his magnificent throne and intently stared at a large pane of some transparent crystal, one of hundreds of similar panes arrayed on a wall in front of him. He watched as the Ghast intently studied the written materials she’d stolen the day before, and smiled with evil satisfaction. His current form was well over seven feet tall and well-muscled, with two huge horns protruding from the forehead. His skin was as black as interstellar space, and flames leaked from around his eyes.
“As you can see, sister Blaze, my jest on the mortals continues to play out. While the Moor tramp was less useful than I’d hoped, she’s managed — with a little help from me — to restore the Ghast to the world.”
“I saw you cause her to pull that costume from the bag, Satanus,” the female demon agreed. Her chosen form at this time was more human; she was amusing herself by distorting the forms of her enemies, and she currently resembled Mary Marvel — an evil Mary Marvel, dressed in black, with fangs and pointed ears. As they were talking, she morphed into a similarly distorted copy of Bulletgirl. “And I sense the chaos in the spell that now imprisons her. Perhaps she will provide us with further amusement, after all.” Her form changed again, and now she looked very much like her brother but with red skin. She snapped her fingers, a second throne appeared, and she sat down next to him.
***
This world was vastly different from the world she remembered. “Totally fictional!” she reminded herself, “no matter how real the memories seem.” Her fictional world had been devastated by war, with humans on one side and Atlantis, aided by her colony on the moon, on the other. Her team, the Jailbirds and Legbreakers Association, had been on neither side, taking advantage of the chaos to loot, acquiring vast wealth, hoards of technology, and stocks of super-weaponry, and had made enemies of the super-heroes of both sides. This setting provided a rich landscape for the SuperYou role-playing game; there had been hundreds of playable scenarios in the materials she’d appropriated. It bothered her that every scenario assumed that the heroes would win. But she wasn’t a fictional loser any longer. She also noted that the Ghast must have been one of the most popular non-playable characters, as her own fictional background was much more complex than even some of the heroes in the scenarios.
The Ghast was relieved to read in the rules that she had no special silly weakness, such as some of her teammates had. (*) Proximity to gold caused the internal workings of the android Adamant to simply stop, while contact with mustard rendered F’ant O’mah unconscious. The Ghast had been worried that she might have some such weakness that she was unaware of. It was a relief to know that she wouldn’t go into an epileptic fit when exposed to a rabbit’s foot, or fall into unconsciousness when she heard a song by Elvis, or some other idiotic thing.
[(*) Editor’s note: See Super Squad: Times Past, 1964: A Halloween Hullabaloo, Chapter 3: The North Atlantic Volcano Caper.]
The big question now was what she should do next. The answer to that one was obvious — she’d ruled a vast criminal empire in her fictional life. It was time to make that story real.