Action Comics #6: "Full Circle and The End"

The Past:

When Metropolis was newborn and it was not the gleaming city we know it as today, it still was a beautiful place to live. The housing was first rate and Suicide Slum had only just begun to decay and become corrupt. But the city was protected by a very special man, one who served in the Justice Society of America and was a close liaison to the President of the United States, one with amazing powers, one who fought against evil, in his homeland and abroad, helping to bring peace to the world. Now like any other cape in the land he had his enemies, but I assure you, none as vicious as the maniacs of today… But what they lacked in viciousness they made up with pure finesse and style. We begin our tale fifty years ago, when popular ‘Miss Metropolis 1955’ was kidnapped and our aforementioned superhero was called in to help.

“It was a hard choice to mistake, I assure you.” A voice emerges from the darkness, but The Champion can’t focus. Everything is fuzzy, his mind in fragments, his concentration broken by the constant buzzing of insects in his ears. “Selling one’s soul to the devil is never an easy choice. Oh, don’t get me wrong, The Champion… I would have sold my soul to defeat you long ago had I known the ways to do so! But with the information in my pocket, the mantra locked in my head, I had to decide what I wanted in return…” The Mechanic steps forwards from a brightlight, and smiles broadly. “I have been so steeped in machines… I never thought of the other option… Magicks!” His crooked smile widens. “But Magick is just another form of science, albeit one that does not have any physical reasoning behind it. So what should I wish for? What should I sell my soul for? Ultimate power? Heh, it was offered… But your pals in the Justice Society would come out of retirement to stop me, save you, you know, the usual tale… I could have reshaped the world in my image but I’ve never wanted to conquer the world. Leave that to the big guns… No, I wanted torment over power. How old am I, The Champion?”

The Champion looks up from where he is chained, and looks around, his arms and legs bound in a sparkling black energy. He strains to escape but is electrocuted some how, his body seizing with the shock. “I… First fought you… Thirty years past… Meaning…”

“No. First mistake has been made. You didn’t face me then, you faced my father. And you killed him.” The bald man steps from the darkness and into view, his features contorted into a demonic façade. “You killed him. He fell from the Daily Planet but his Clockwork Men brought him back home to me. My mother had left some years before of course, leaving only me and him to survive in anyway we could… and he died in my arms.”

“D-Died?” The Champion’s eyes widen, surprised. “I searched… For hours… I couldn’t find any sign!”

“Because The Mechanic was meticulous!” The young villain laughs. “I trained myself in his art for ten years. When I was twenty I faced you for the first time and I lost, I have no shame about failure… But it gave me time to think. Twenty years later, here I am, entering my middle years, and I made a decision. I must stop you. I have a family on the way! I have children coming! I can’t let this petty familial feud tear my new future apart.”

“Then… Release me! Let me go… We can end this like men!”

“Men?” The villain spits the word, disgusted. “I am a man, you are a murderer. My father fell from one of the tallest buildings in this city… Both his ankles broke! His left shin and his right hip were shattered… He separated five ribs and dislocated his shoulder. You killed him in the worst way possible. You left him to suffer. He died from blood loss. Or the pain… Who knows? Impossible to say now.”

“I didn’t mean to…”

“Paved by the worst intentions, Champion!” The villain moves his hand in some kind of pattern, and a small white wand appears in his hand. “Anyway, my dear enemy, I have now prepared your torment. Imprisonment. You shall live in a shell not your own, and you will have moments of purest clarity, but not being able to act.” He begins to move the wand, up and down, left to right, a method to his madness.

“Please, don’t do this!”

The second man to bear the name of The Mechanic screams in anger. “I HAVE TO!” He turns as a woman enters the small chamber, and holds onto the shoulder of the villain.

“S-Save me…” The Champion tries to reach out but is wracked with pain. He recognises the woman as the Miss Metropolis he had been sent to rescue. “Please!”

“You hurt my husband, The Champion. I have no troubles allowing you to suffer like he has.” She kisses his enemies cheek, and smiles. “Dinner will be ready in thirty, Mark. You should hurry up down here… I can feel your son kicking.” She rubs her belly, and smiles.

“Will do, honey.” She walks up the stairs and he smiles. “Beautiful is she not? Beautiful and understanding.” he weaves the incantation with the wand and utters a secret word not heard by human ears for twenty thousand years, and then takes a breath. “Finito.”

The world turns white. Things change, events shift and connect and then… The world forgets. The Champion is forgotten forever, and a new citizen joins Metropolis’ ranks.

They call him Joe.

Interlude One:

“I want him. I want him in my custody at LexCorp.” Luthor nods slowly. “You can do this for me, you can get me the body.”

“The body?” Westfield shakes his head. “The man’s still alive!”

“Man? MAN?! The courts proved Superman isn’t human, so the same must apply to his brother. He is an object for auction, and I’m offering you whatever it’ll take.”

Westfield looks up at Luthor and sighs. He was heavily in debt and Luthor knew it, using the situation to his advantage and twisting everything to get his way. “Twenty million.”

“Twenty million?” Luthor stands up, smiling. “A most reasonable offer!” He smiles and shakes Westfield’s hand. “I’ll send a squad over to your building to secure his transfer… Is that ok?”

“Of course. The lab will be empty, I’ll tell security to let your people through. When can I expect my money?”

“It’s in your back account as of…” Luthor moves his finger over his cell phone, and presses send. “Now. Good doing business with you, Westfield. Consider that Cadmus is missing a director ever since that awful Hamilton business with the Bizarro’s… Send in a resume, I’ll put in a word!”

“Thank you Mr Luthor, thank you so much…”

“No need to thank me, Westfield. You’re doing this for your country.” Luthor smiles and walks out the room, and smiles.

End Interlude.

Interlude Two:

I saw everything that happened to The Champion… But I assure you I couldn’t do anything about it. It’s not my job to do something like that… Not my job at all. I watch, I review, I analyse. Like a cosmic-powered film critic with the ability to look through time. I was viewing the linear timelines when I met a branch beginning… Say 1900. When a small, sickly child was born… And then vanished. Continuity was overwritten by a magic I could not discern… And this man was written over, to become an enigma in existence. I view both time streams as one, and note where events have divulged from the original line, and my eyes widen. I see a man sell his soul to a hell creature (a race I assure you exist…) and then create the ultimate torment for America’s greatest hero, The Champion… But I couldn’t fix anything, I couldn’t fix this grand disfiguring change to reality until the spell wore thin, and the blood focus was diluted enough so I could free the trapped and give him sentience once more… I allowed him a window of free thought and he did what he had to, taking his captor out of the picture and allowing him to free himself. Now I wait, and watch, as someone… something… Emerges in Metropolis, recreating events from the past, to set the same trap…

End Interlude

“I married a Miss Metropolis, you know?” The man rolls his fingers over the woman’s head, and down her face, towards her chest. “We had beautiful children, and then they had beautiful grandchildren… Good breeding, I assure you.” He moves his finger over her breast, and then circles around her belly button. “But something happened. I was assured that something was supposed to happen and it didn’t, so I’m back from where I was resting pleasantly to finish my chore. Terrible, terrible news…” He smiles and licks his lips, his old, wrinkled skin tight against his skull.

Miss Metropolis 2005 looks up and shakes her head, terrified. “Wh-What do you want with me?”

“Oh you know, the usual cliché… You are bait, and my hero shall return to save the day… And we begin this again… I suppose that because my granddaughter is dead I shall have to spawn a new guardian, and I was wondering if you’d be…” He rolls his finger towards her belt, and smiles. “…Open to that…”

“Get away from me! SUPERMAN! SUPERMAN!!” She wriggles about on the stone tablet, and screams, but the man just smiles.

“Superman? I’ve heard about him. Well… Two birds, one stone…” He takes out an ornate black bladed knife from his belt and holds it up, smiling.

“STOP!” Superman bursts through the ceiling of the dank room just as the old man is about to plunge his knife between Miss Metropolis’ breasts. With a blink of his eye the knife glows red hot and the villain drops it, causing it to clatter across the floor. “Back away from the woman if you know what’s good for you, sir.”

“Good for me?” The man smiles and flicks his hand, a white wand appearing between his fingers. “Oh I know what’s good for me… But do you know what’s good for you?”

Superman is about to knock the criminal out with a flick of his fingers when he’s grabbed by an invisible force, and the world goes black.

Superman wakes up, his chest bare, his limbs chained down by some unseen energy. He struggles to escape, but is wracked with pain, an electrical current bursting through him. “Who the hell are you?” The man in the shadows steps forward, the white wand in his hand.

“I… Am The Mechanic. You can call me Mark. I’m about to end your existence so we mght as well be on a first name basis, Clark.” He smiles. “Or do you prefer Kal? I never understood your choice of names.”

Superman shakes his head, a wry smile on his face. “You know my name? Am I supposed to be impressed?”

Mark shakes his head. “Oh no, no, no!” He moves his white wand around, smiling. “Not impressed, no… Shocked, yes, but impressed? I’d expect nothing of the sort from a man of your stature. When one’s soul is sent to the bottom of hell, you hear rumblings… And I must say all the demons are utterly terrified of Superman. I don’t see it though…”

“Let me out and I’ll show you, Mark.” He wrenches his hands up, nearly escaping the bonds, but is slammed down by darkness, the intense electricity bursting through him once more.

“Nuh-Uh, girlfriend. I’m here to make sure my archenemy remains trapped in his worthless excuse for a human being prison. See, if I place you under the same kind of spell, then you’ll never inspire anyone, and you won’t be a factor in his return, meaning he’ll be easy pickings, get me?” He continues to move the wand around, weaving an invisible spell web.

“You’re insane… You’ll never get away with this!”

Mark shakes his head, his head shaking. “I DON’T WANT TO GET AWAY WITH IT, BUT I WILL!” He smiles, calming himself. “No one will remember you. I might make sure your escape ship is caught in the tidal wave of radioactivity that slaughtered your people. That’d be much easier, would it not?” He grins. “WOULD IT NOT?”

“You’ll never get away with this.” Superman smiles again. “You know why?”

“Why, oh ‘he-who-can-never-be-wrong’?”

“Because I hear that noise.” The roof explodes and Steel and The Champion burst through the ceiling, and Steel blasts the villain back with a beam of white sound. The Champion leaps onto the villain, and grapples with him, knocking the wand out of his hand, and sending him flying.

Steel turns to Superman and shakes his head. “Joey can handle him, but these bonds… Is this contained electricity? Or is it worse than that? Is it magic?”

“I don’t know but… Did you say Joey? Joey who was… He was wearing a t-shirt with… Oh my… It’s all falling into place…” Superman shakes his head. “Magic, must be…”

Steel smiles beneath his helmet. “Good. I want to try something.” Steel places a gloved hand on one of the bars of energy, and presses a button in his gauntlet, and the magic fluctuates and shimmer, then explodes, sending Steel flying and Superman reeling.

“Oh… Such a bad idea… Magic is not my thing…”

“Y-You think?”

Superman is suddenly released from his bonds, and Steel helps him up, his mask retracted. “Well… I think you’ll agree that was intense.”

“Yes, John. Intense is the word. But Champion… What did you do?”

Joseph is about to talk when a bright light fills the room, and a man steps out of a white door from thin air, his head full of blonde hair, wearing a green and red jump suit. “The Champion, I presume?”

Steel, Superman and The Champion all raise their fists, ready. “Who are you?”

“You can call me Rip Hunter, Linear Man, Agent of Time.” He smiles. “And you are heroes. The iconic but greatly missed legend known as Superman, the deceased urban vigilante known as Black Steel, and you. The Champion.”

Steel and Superman look at each other, confused. “What?”

Rip hits his head with his hand, rolling his eyes. “Sorry, my continuity is rubbish when I’ve been travelling. American icon Superman, meta specialist Steel, and you. The Champion. I have some news… Which you might not like.”

“News?” Joseph steps forward, a look of curiosity across his chiselled features.

“This time stream has been altered so you cannot exist here any longer. The chrono-knots (you were close, John, but not close enough) have begun to destroy your cells… And on this Earth, this means certain doom for yourself.” He shakes his head, and places his hand on the long forgotten hero’s shoulder. “But I have a way out. I have taken the moment you were trapped stepped back moments before you vanished into the Daily Planet globe… and stretched that moment out, cut and pasted it into a new continuum (and lost half my paid vacation time for it, I assure you) and allowed time to play out. You have a chance to return home, and live your life…”

“You… You’re serious?” Joseph looks at the two Metropolis heroes, tears forming across his eyes.

“I’m a Linear Man, how can I not be?” He clears his throat. I’ll be waiting through here…” He motions to the blindingly white door, and steps through, but turns to Superman as he’s about to be brought through. “It’s coming, Kal-El. It is coming so beware your kin.” And with that he’s gone, vanished into the light.

Before Superman can question the words, The Champion places his hand on his shoulder. “I must go, friends…” Joseph takes a breath. “I thank you… So very much… For all you’ve done. I’ve had an interesting life… But with this… I can start over… Exist.”

“Go for it, dude.” Steel smiles. “It’s been a wild ride.”

“That it has. I will miss you greatly.” The Champion smiles, and looks around. “It could have been 1970, you know that?”

Superman laughs, and nods. “Yeah, I suppose. Good luck Joey.”

Champion winks and smiles. “Joseph.” And with that he leaps into the white door, and it closes with a pop, leaving Steel and Superman smiling.

“Superman!” Miss Metropolis throws her arms around the Metropolis Marvel and hugs him tight, and then turns to Steel. “Steel!” She throws her arms around him too, and smiles. “You’re here to save me!”

“Exactly that, miss.” Superman nods. “Let’s get out of here.” The two heroes walk out of the door, and to the police station. It had been a long day, and the end was finally in sight.