The Chronomancer

PERSONAL

Gender: Male

Kit: Alien

Location: New York City

AFFILIATION

Alignment: Villain

Team: The Fallen

VITAL STATS

Strength: weak (rank 0)

Agility: standard (rank 1)

Mind: standard (rank 1)

Body: weak (rank 0)

Spirit: (rank )

Charisma: (rank )

RECORD

Infamy Points: 475

Personal Wins: 14

Personal Losses: 4

Team Wins: 0

Team Losses: 0

Tourney Wins: 0

Tourney Losses: 0

STATUS

Status: Active

MediaMan

It's night time in the city and rain falls from the sky in sheets. As people grumble and reach for their umbrellas, some turn their heads to watch a man sprint past them, his shirt drenched in blood. They don't know where he's running to. Neither does he. The only direction he knows is "away." He goes straight, turns left, turns right, keeps going. He runs into a woman, who tells him to watch it, buddy. He looks at her with wide eyes, shakes his head, and keeps on running. The woman looks down and sees that blood has stained her jacket. She takes out her cell phone and dials three numbers. The man keeps running.

Soon, he is at the docks. Nowhere to go. The river crackles with thousands of ripples beneath the rain. He stops and coughs, then vomits. Wiping his mouth after, he looks around frantically and sees a boarded up white building right on the water's edge. The wood is old and rotten and tearing the planks off proves easier than he anticipated. Inside, it smells like mold and sawdust. He takes a seat at one of the booths lining the left side of the room and puts his face in his hands and gasps for breath.

"Oh god. Oh god. Ohgodohgodohgodohgod..." He sniffs. "What did I do? What did I DO?"

"What did WE do, I think you meant to ask," said the gentleman who appeared to be sitting across from him, who appeared to have always have been sitting across from him. "The answer? That which was necessary."

"Oh god... My wife... My children..."

"Were holding you back."

"They're dead."

"You're free. We're free. You did what you had to do. There are far more important things to worry about than some dead bodies bleeding out on the floor. If it makes you feel any better, your wife was going to die of ovarian cancer in about 20 years, your son was going to be hit by a car in 15 years and your daughter was going to die from a stroke in 60 year."

"Please. Stop."

"And then, of course, in about 5 billion years your sun will simply run out of energy and anything left on this planet will be naught more than a cold, frozen ball of ice. That is, if it's not swept up in its dying nova first."

"I'm going crazy. I AM crazy."

The man rubs his eyes and looks across the table again, hoping that he's alone again, hoping that the vision that had been haunting him for months would be gone and that none of the screaming, the crying, the pleading, the bleeding that he'd seen had never happened and that he would be able to just go home and see his family and tell them that work has been really stressful lately and that maybe he should go to a doctor because he's really concerned that he could be really sick and need help.

The gentleman across the table is still there. He gives a modest shrug.

"So sorry. Still here. Looks like you're stuck with me."

"Shut up. Shut up, shut up, shut UP! You're not real! You're not REAL!"

The man lunges across the table to throttle the vision before him only for his hands to pass uselessly through.

"No. No I'm not. But with your help, I can be. Once again."

 

The gentleman across the table looked hard at him. He had the the same color eyes. The same color hair. The same type of face. The gentleman had a neatly trimmed mustache, shaped in the style popular with men in the Victorian era but, other than that, the resemblance was remarkable. He dressed the part too: top hat, monocle, cane.

He spoke.

"There are worlds. So many worlds. So many it would be absurd to count them all. Infinite. More are born each second than there are stars in your galaxy. Some are so close to yours -- in one world, you take one step whereas in another you take two. Others, so different -- Earth is a gas giant, winds howling, storms raging. Each of them is a possibility." The gentleman looked askance, his brow furrowed. "I used to travel through these worlds with ease. Their very form, their very substance was mine to command. But something happened. Long, long ago. Before this universe was even born. I don't know what, exactly. I don't know how or where or even precisely when. But I know it was something powerful. Something awe-inspiriting and terrifying and shocking and traumatic. What we see, what we live, here, now, is the result. I remember... Or, rather, you remember small pieces of what happened. You remember a tower. A battle. A fall. But not much else."

Visions. It was how this whole mess had started for the man, about a year ago, bursts of some other world or time that pushed into his mind like lightning and then faded just as fast. Now, as the gentleman across him from spoke, they coursed through his mind like water from a burst dam. A glistening black spire jutting obscenely toward the sky. What looked like an angel shouting something he could neither hear not understand. A flash of light followed by an explosion.

"There was something important, something critical, that I, you, were meant to stop. And we failed, despite our best efforts. And then? Silence. For eons. Nothingness. But then you were born. And, without even realizing it, before taking your first breath, you remembered. And with that memory, so I too was born, an ancient seed planted in the back of your mind, an unconscious process manifesting as a nagging feeling that something was painfully, dreadfully wrong. You were never aware of it, but for your entire life, you have been working to figure out why. In moments of quiet reflection, you nourished me, even as you dismissed this unease as some fleeting moment of dread that all people experience from time to time. In your dreams, sometimes, you spoke to me, your nightmares the process by which we negotiated this pernicious quandary. As you grew from a boy to a man, your path was guided by some sort of impulse you don't entirely understand but none the less made you who you are today."

"Decades you have spent pondering this problem, this life-defining question: why does everything feel so wrong? Why do you feel trapped your own life? How can you be nothing but yourself but, at the same time, feel like you should have been someone else entirely? I am this question you have been asking since you were first capable of thought. I am appearing before you because you know that you are finally close to some sort of answer. We don't know everything just yet but we do know that there are certain steps that must by taken regardless. We know that for life to finally feel right, for you to finally feel right, these tasks must be done."

The man looked at the gentleman across from him.

"What tasks?" he asked. "I don't know what to do. I just stabbed my entire family... Oh god... I just stabbed my entire family to death. Oh god." He began to cry anew. The gentleman rose from his seat and put his arm around the man's shoulder.

"Yes. We did. Because that was the first task. And the easiest. The others will be a little more challenging. But in the end, you will become the person you were meant to be this whole time. You know what to do because I know what to do. We don't know for what purpose or goal just yet but we are certain that once we do these things which we are compelled to do it will become much more clear. And once things are clear, we know we can go back to the task which we had previously failed. And no one will stand in our way again."

 

Foresight and Planning

     Tactician: superior (rank 2)

 

Bright, flashing light seeped through the cracks in the boarded up windows, casting a pulsating glow across the man's face. The police were here. The man looked down at his shirt and remembered that it was covered in blood. He looked at the gentleman who was, at the moment, nonchalantly wiping his monocle on his shirt lapel.

"You have six and a half minutes before three police officers will break down the door to this place. I know that you think you are clearly insane and that if you surrender yourself, they will show mercy. You are wrong. As of today, you are a slayer of children. Should you remain where you are, you will be shot five times, three times in the chest and twice in the head. They will say you assumed a threatening posture and had to defend themselves and while no one will believe them, all will understand. You must not let this happen. Here is what you must do."

Six minutes later, three officers approached the building, guns drawn. The first looked back at the two behind him and nodded before taking a deep breath and kicking the door. It didn't budge. He kicked it again. The sound produced was dull and heavy as if something large was blocking the way. He sighed and told the other two officers to grab the battering ram from the cruiser.

A few minutes later, the three finally broke through, the officers moving aside debris of shattered door and what appeared to be a set of boards that had been braced against the entrance. One of the cops scratched his head. If these things had just been stacked against the door, he thought, wouldn't they have just fallen over when he kicked them? He looked around, then, and saw one board that had remained whole. It was actually, he noticed, angled against one of the support beams. The beam shuddered as if giving its dying breath.

The man was running down along the docks as the building collapsed, crushing all three officers inside.

 

Premonition

     Danger Sense: superior (rank 2)

 

Six months later and the man had somehow broken into a highly secured lab in the middle of the night, the gentleman telling him when the guards made their rotations and where the lasers for the security systems were. He had no idea what any of the things he was furtively stuffing into his bag were but somehow knew that they were important. He had been doing this, at various labs, over the last few nights and each time, despite his confidence that this was the night he would finally be caught and turned over to the police, he continued to sneak away and build a horde of objects he could not understand. He now had the same neatly trimmed mustache as the gentleman and his eyes had developed the same hard, determined quality as well. Right as he placed the last object in his bag and zipped it up, the gentleman whispered in his ear.

"Duck."

Three shots rang out and whizzed right above his head, sparks flying from the their impact. He ran toward the exit, more shots following him as the guards raced forward, the man getting out of the way of each one at just the right moment. He turned a corner and immediately rolled out of the way of the baton of a guard who had been waiting for him before making his way out the building, alarms drilling into his ear like a panicked pulse. By the time he heard dogs barking after him, he was already a good quarter mile from the facility, where a pipe that led to the sewer tunnel where he had been making his home lay waiting for him. He was gone, once again.

"Good. Good," said the gentleman as the man gasped and wheezed against the wall amid the sounds of flowing water. "Soon, we'll have the parts that we need and we can begin the work of actually building the device."

"What," said the man, "will happen when the thing is finally assembled? What are you making me build? What are we going to do with this thing?"

The gentleman gave a shrug.

"The truth? You have no idea. So why should I? All I know is that it's vitally important and that you should spend more time thinking about how you're going to get the rest of the components so we can find out for sure."

"There's something you're not telling me. You know more than you let on. Tell me why we are doing this."

"You think I have some sort of ulterior motive, but in truth my motives are no more or less than what you, on some deep level, want anyway. Have wanted your entire life."

"What do I want then?"

"All you want is for you to be who you are truly meant to be. And we have made remarkable progress toward that goal lately. But it's not over. There is still much that needs to be done. While I do not know for sure what it is that is at the conclusion of this whole affair, what I do know is by the time it is done, you will finally, for the first time in your life, fulfill your potential. You will be the best you that you can be."

 

A Sense of Time

     Reaction Speed: superior (rank 2)

 

His eyes flickered awake and his hand jutted out to grab a wrist before he even knew what was happening before, smoothly, connecting with a soft gut with his other hand. A knife clattered to the floor next to his stinking cot. Finally registering the situation in his mind, he saw an intruder doubled over in pain, moaning.

"Who are you? What are you doing here?"

The intruder took a few breaths and smiled.

"You got a nice place here. Lot of prime merchandise," said the intruder. "I been watching you come in and out of this place these last few days. Took me a while to find where you were actually going. Thought at first you'd be somewhere in town, not down here. But, no, you sleep down here too. You know it's not safe down here. Lots of shady characters. Folks who wouldn't think twice of slicing your throat and taking all that shiny stuff you got here, know what I'm sayin'?"

The man stood up and faced the intruder. He spoke with a voice he didn't know he had. A voice that was contemptuous and snarling, as if addressing the figure before him were a bothersome chore that he was none the less roped into doing.

"No. No I don't. And neither do you. Because if you did know, you'd have never come here to begin with. You'd have stayed far, far away and have gone on with your pathetic little life until you die of an infected cut you get in a knife fight two years from now. But you've come here and you've threatened me and my work and you've moved up fate by just a little more." His inflection and pitch matched that of the gentleman who, from the corner, looked on silently.

The intruder smirked. "You some sorta tough guy now?" A scraping sound, quiet at first but growing louder, began filling the room. "You better hope you are. Because if you haven't noticed, I'm a tough guy too. Maybe the toughest one around." The intruder's teeth grew into a row of needle fangs that he

tapped with fingers that ended in pointed blades. "And I don't need a knife to kill you."

 

Time Management

     Super Speed: superior (rank 2)

 

The intruder lunged with his claws. He was fast. But then, something odd happened. Suddenly, he wasn't that fast. In fact, the man noticed, he was actually quite slow indeed. He watched as the razor claws appeared to practically inch their way to his throat. If the man had just stood there, they maybe could have slashed him eventually. He didn't. He reached up with his hand and grabbed the intruder's wrist. The man thought that the intruder would have reacted but it seemed like he just stood there, not even realizing what had happened. Thinking of what to do, the man angled the intruder's wrist down and then, changing his grip, pushed the claw toward his gut.

When the pinpoints connected, blood didn't start spurting out. Red dots began appearing where the punctures entered but nothing spread as far as the man perceived. The man, still holding the intruder's arm, then pulled the claw upwards, creating a canyon across his torso. It was then that time sped up

and the blood gushed forth like a fountain. The intruder couldn't even scream so much as gargle as everything that he was spilled out onto the floor below him. He thrashed for only a few seconds before finally he was still. The man looked blankly at the corpse as the gentleman in the corner clapped with white gloved hands.

"Bravo! Bravo!" said the gentleman. "You were a regular iron gem, possessed of more mettle now that you ever did as a milquetoast office clerk! Did you ever think, processing spreadsheets a year ago, that you'd have ever bested such a predator? A year ago, you were prey! But now? Now you have what it takes to remove obstacles in your way. How do you feel?"

The man looked at the blood slowly pooling by the side of the corpse. He searched inside himself for something to say before offering up "Nothing. Nothing at all."

The gentleman smiled. "Good. You are improving." He walked over to the body and ineffectually kicked it, his foot passing through the dead flesh, but not appearing to really care. "This will not be the last obstacle in your way as you walk down the path upon which we tread. Today was but a simple predator, but I can guarantee you that there will be more sophisticated opposition as we draw closer to our goal. You must be ready. Are you ready? Ready to do what needs to be done?"

The man thought about his dead family, their looks of horror and shock as he plunged in the knife, guided by a compulsion he could neither understand nor resist. That night was only a half a year ago but already it felt centuries away. He realized it was the first time he had thought of them since this whole ordeal began. Intellectually he knew that he should be feeling disgust, remorse, shame, all these things and more. He willed his mind to summon these feelings to punish him for his indiscretion, to flay his soul like they would any other human being. But nothing came. Playing the scene in his head was like watching a movie of someone else, and a badly made one at that. All he could force himself to feel when remembering that night was a feeling of tightness, like wearing a suit two sizes too small, and a feeling of ease when he saw the last one dead. He looked at the body now, the blood creeping toward his cot on the floor. Proof of his power. Like finding a word for a concept that he had always known but never named.

"Yes."