Secrets of the Guardians

Troll’s skin was moving, all over his body, as if something was in there trying to get out.  I think I must have screamed a little… I remember Kroft’s eyes on me for a moment, his expression unreadable.  Then things happened fast.

Troll kind of exploded.

His pants ripped, and his body just seemed to fall apart.  It really made my stomach turn to see it.  In a single moment, he went from being one big purple man to a pile of eight people… five nude men, two nude women, and a man in a blue costume.  The dressed man didn’t look injured, but the naked people were all terribly scarred and emaciated, and most were maimed in some way.  Some were missing a hand or a foot; one woman’s face was terribly scarred and her left eye socket was empty.

It took my mind a moment to understand what I was seeing.  The dressed man was Micron, and he seemed conscious, but groggy.  The other bodies, well, they were the people who had been combined to create Troll.  They all seemed unconscious at first, but then one man, the only one who seemed to have all his extremities and most of his hair, stirred as if waking up.

“Troll?” I asked.  He looked at me.

“Polly?” he replied.  “What happened?”  His voice didn’t sound right… too high.  I mean, still masculine, but not deep like it had been before.

“You’ve been split up,” I said.  “Look, tell me these aren’t the other people who were in the lab with you when you became Troll.”

He sat up and looked at the bodies piled around him.  “Oh my God.”

Micron stood up and came over to us.  “What happened to these people?”

“It’s complicated,” I said.

“They don’t look very good,” he continued.  “I’m a paramedic, let me look at them.”  I helped him sort out the bodies… they almost filled the lower deck of Kroft’s little ship.  “They’re in comas, all of them.”

“Up until a few moments ago, these six plus that guy,” I said, pointing at the one I was calling Troll, “were all one big guy.”

Seeing me pointing at him, Troll said, “Call me Michael.”

“Michael,” I replied, smiling.  He had burn scars on the right side of his face, and his right ear was partially missing.  I felt really guilty, because I actually found him less attractive this way than as Troll.  Troll was this big, tragic yet wonderful guy, truly larger than life… this was just a guy with a nasty scar on his face.

Wow, that sounds shallow.  It wasn’t about his looks… it was about how he felt to me.  Michael had a whole different, I don’t know, vibe is what Grandma Beth would say.  He was different, and I could feel it, but I didn’t know why.

“These people are dying,” said Micron.  I turned to him.  His mask covered his whole face… his costume was solid blue, made of the stuff they make wetsuits from, with no visible fasteners at the seams.  Even his eyes were hidden behind protective lenses.  But I could hear in his voice what I couldn’t see in his face.

“Troll… Michael.  I hate to say this, but I think you need to pull yourselves together,” I said.  “I think the only thing keeping all of you alive was being combined.”

“No,” he said, flatly.  “This is my chance.  I can be normal again.”  He looked at the other bodies briefly, then turned away.  “They were all dead anyway.  So was I.  One of us should get a second chance to be a person, right?”

“Michael,” I said, putting my arms around him, “I understand.”

“No,” he said, trying to push me away, “you don’t.  Let me go.  I have my life back… let me live it.”

I let him go, and turned away.  Micron was examining all the, well, victims, and he looked up at me briefly and shook his head.  “Without life support equipment, they’ll all be dead in less than an hour.”

“It’s almost like they’re running down or something,” I replied.

“I suspect they are suffering from a variety of organ failures, actually,” he said.

Michael was leaning over the side of the ship, careful to keep his center of gravity on the safe side of the rail.  I went over to him, hoping I’d think of some way to convince him.  I didn’t want to see six-sevenths of one of my best friends die on the deck of the airship, on a mission I had arranged.  But he kept his face turned away from me, and refused to answer when I tried to speak to him.  Finally, I gave up and went back to Micron.

I didn’t ask how they were doing; his posture, bent down over their bodies, told me everything I needed to know.  Instead, I said, “I’m Mystery Woman.”

“Micron,” he said, standing up and holding out his hand.  I gave him a firm handshake.  “Have you heard of me?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “I studied up on the previous mission here before we came.”

He just stood there for a moment, still holding my hand.  “How long has it been?”  So I told him.  “Damn,” he replied, “twenty years gone.  I don’t feel a bit older, but everyone will have moved on.  I’m probably legally dead.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He looked at me.  “I had a kid.  He’s probably about your age now.  Hell, he’s about my age now.”  He let go of my hand finally, and turned his attention back to the comatose people lying on the deck.  “Has much changed?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said.  “A lot.  I don’t know where to even start.”

“Never mind,” he said.  “If we get out of here, I suppose I’ll have plenty of time to find out.”  He looked up at me again.  “No mask?”

“Oh,” I said.  “Troll knew my secret identity, and Kroft, the captain of this ship, doesn’t like people in masks.”

He stood up again, and with a practiced motion pulled his mask off from back to front.  He was black, which I had sort of figured from his voice; he had a handsome face with a nice smile, and his head was shaved.  He caught my glance and said, “Smooth on top makes the mask go on better.”

“You didn’t have to unmask for me,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter,” he replied.  “I’m guessing from your accent that you’re from California.  You probably won’t ever see me out of uniform again, so it’s not like I’m giving anything away.  I probably won’t see you out of uniform again either, right?”

“Um,” I said, “you might.  I’m kind of a public person in my secret identity.”

Michael snorted, and I knew some kind of comment would follow, but he started coughing instead.  “Oh, shit,” he said, when the coughing had passed.  He walked over to us, and I saw that the elbow he had coughed into was bloody.  There was some blood on his face too, under his nose and around his mouth.

“It’s not just them,” said Micron, waving a hand at the dying people on the deck.  “It’s you too.  You all depend on each other to live.”

He looked at Micron, and then at me, and despair was written all over his face.  I never saw such a look before then.

“Michael, come with me,” I said, and I put my arm around him and led him to the front of the ship.  “Look,” I said, “I know you don’t want to go back to being Troll, but you have to or you’ll die.  You’ll all die.  But now we know you can be separated… maybe Doctor Hyde can find a way to free you again, in a hospital where you all can get treatment.”

“I guess,” he said, reluctantly.  “I guess I have to.  Better just get this over with.”  He turned toward the others with a purposeful expression, but then another coughing fit took hold of him, and he went down to one knee and coughed more blood on the deck.  When the coughing abated, I helped him up and half carried him to the first of the comatose people, one of the men.  He was missing most of his right arm and his right foot, and had burn scars over almost half of his body.

Michael sat down beside him.  “This is Sam,” he said.  “Huh.  I don’t really know how this works.”  He put his hands on the comatose man’s chest, closed his eyes and seemed to be concentrating, but nothing happened.  After a moment he opened his eyes, looking perplexed.  “We were huddled together,” he mused, and he laid down beside Sam and put his arm around him.  Nothing happened.  “Damn,” he said, sounding a bit scared.  He coughed then, briefly, and sat up.  “What am I going to do now?”

“Do you remember anything at all about the first time?” I asked.  “Anything you haven’t told me?”

“Everything was burning,” he said.  “The smoke was nasty… plastic smoke, very toxic.  We huddled together behind a metal console we thought might not burn, but the heat and smoke were too much for us.  I remember… I remember a pulling sensation.  In my gut, sort of, and then all over my body…”

The proverbial light bulb went on in my head.  “Michael, it’s not your power.”

“What?”

“It’s not your power that merged you all together,” I said.  “One of these others has the power.”

“Oh, crap,” he said.  “They’re all out.  How do we figure out which one has the power?”

I stood there looking at the comatose, dying people.  One of them held the key.  “Who was closest to you?” I asked.  “When it happened, I mean.”

“Chung and Sophie.  That’s Chung,” he said, pointing.  “I’m not sure which woman is Sophie, they’re both so scarred.”

“Look, here!” said Micron, pointing to the woman with one eye.  “Her eye is moving.  She’s in a REM state… dreaming.  The others are comatose.”

I knelt down beside her, shook her right shoulder and said “Wake up!” but she didn’t respond.

Then Michael knelt down too, and said, “Let me.”  I stood up, and he laid down beside her, rolled her halfway away from him and cuddled up behind her.  He whispered, “Now, Sophie,” in her ear.

What happened next was mind-bending… they sort of flowed together.  When they were done, they… he?… sat up.  I wasn’t sure what two of them merged would look like.  His genitals were still male; his left arm and left eye looked smaller than their mates.  His skin was redder than either of them separately.

“I feel it now.  It’s her power.”  He moved over to the next body, one of the men, and merged with him the same way.  In just a few moments, Troll was reformed.

He looked different, somehow, but it was definitely him.  I wanted to hug him, and tell him how happy I was that he was okay, but I felt kind of self-conscious with Micron standing there.  Then Kroft came down from the foredeck, walked up beside me and said, “He got blood on my deck.”  I turned to face him, incredulous.  He gave me a grumpy look and handed me a mop scaled more to his size than to mine.

So I cleaned up the mess.  What else was I going to do?

…

As soon as we landed, we made our way to the archway as fast as we could.  Having made two trips away from the gate already, I had hacked a pretty clear path through the scrubby little trees.  Micron had put his mask back on (since, as he pointed out, he had no pockets in his uniform); Troll and I had to slow our pace so that he could keep up.  I gathered his shrinking power was all he had… he didn’t have the kind of strength, stamina, or toughness that I did.  But he was in excellent shape for a basically normal man, and we did make pretty good time.

Troll’s pants had been destroyed when he, well, separated.  Kroft had apparently been offended by his nudity (or maybe he felt inadequate, who knows?) and had given Troll a square of multi-colored silk originally intended as a patch for the balloon, as well as a thin piece of rope to tie it on with.  This impromptu kilt kept getting caught on the brush, and soon the lower edge was in tatters.  I would normally have made a joke about it, but I could see Troll was definitely not in the mood.

Shortly we were standing in the shallow ravine, with the archway in front of us.  I drew my sword and opened the gate.

I had half a second to realize that the gate was chest-deep in water on the other side, and then the water came through in a rush, sweeping me off of my feet.  The flood carried me down the ravine, bashing me against the stones on one side or the other; it didn’t hurt, but it sure kept me off balance.  I wasn’t really worried until I remembered that the ravine came to an end at the edge of the island.

I didn’t know what would happen if I fell into that endless red sky, but I knew I didn’t want to find out.