Imagine, if you are so inclined, a tall, wiry sort of young man. He has long, strawberry blonde hair that looks like it could have really used a trim a year ago. He also looks like he could use some new clothes, since his over-sized, baggy black pants and exceedingly tight crimson tank top are on the verge of disintegrating any moment now. He looks mad, very mad indeed. And he's brandishing both a magic broadsword and a cobbled together, high tech Frankengun at you...

(That should do for a 'cover', shouldn't it?)

He returned to consciousness slowly, ever so relaxingly, as if he had been asleep for a very long time. The Sleep of the Just, you might call it, for he felt none of the weight of the world that had so recently been pulling him under the water, metaphorically speaking. It was the most relaxed he had ever felt in his entire life, and he was happy for it. The cynic in him would have screamed in bloody terror at that, simply knowing how things had gone before.

When the young man opened his eyes, said inner cynic simply nodded in that knowing, told-you-so sort of way. For one thing, he wasn't sure how he got there, in the middle of this strange, magic looking circle. In other circumstances he may've been aroused by the naked, voluptuous female body writhing beneath him as it pulled against the ropes binding her to the upside down Pi symbol painted on the ground below. If he were, say, watching this on television.

But the young man was wearing a strange black, silken robe that also had the upside down Pi symbol on it in brilliant blue - a perfect match for those adorning the twenty five or so men watching him with anticipation, safely outside the circle he stood within. His eyes were then drawn to his hands, where he saw the over-sized, incredibly sharp looking ceremonial blade being held there. Looking down, he saw the blade hovered over the woman's heart.

"What the...!?"

She was saying something, but he couldn't hear it. Everything was so quiet. He tried to concentrate on her lips, the very shape of the words he couldn't hear, and suddenly the world of sound returned to him in a flash, mostly in the form of his own racing heart beat. "Don't...," she said. Lowering the sword, the young man tugged at the hood covering his eyes, noting his bangs were getting in the way of his vision. Bangs? But wasn't his hair always short? What was going on?

And then he heard the chorus of other voices. Angry voices. "He's fallen from the Ology! His mind returns to the world of flesh and vice!" "You did not study with him intently enough!" "He hesitates!" "Fool, I told you his mind was possessed of incredible strength, and would resist brute force Ology treatment!" "We'll all be punished!" "If he does not complete the sacrifice, dread Ocpatex cannot transcend the lower realms to join us in his vessel!"

Though a jumble at first, the sentences slowly sorted themselves out in the young man's head. A particularly dim picture of the men before him formed in his mind, and while he couldn't place how he had arrived at this point, what an Ocpatex was, or what his own name was just yet, his core personality had reasserted itself after many months of being vacant. And now, once again in ascendance, it chose his next course of action without hesitation.

It started with his mouth. "Fuck THIS."

Lifting the blade over his head, the young man hacked the ropes binding the woman's hands, and then lurched over to inflict the same punishment on the lengths restraining her legs. Stunned at first, she the attempted to cover herself, at which point the young man pulled his robe off and presented it to her. "Here - I won't be needing this, I bet." As screams of rage rose from the circle around him, he looked down at the upside down Pi symbol.

Knowing it to be important to them, he hacked at it with their own sword. This, then, elicited a more direct response from the men without. "Seize him! We'll either salvage him or feed him to the Kedae!" Three of the robed men advanced into the circle, at which point the woman he almost killed leapt behind him for protection. He looked back at her, then down at his own body, and felt that he was never quite so... wiry before. What has been going on here?

His muscles were toned to an almost impossible degree, and he seemed to have little - if any - body fat. He looked as if he hadn't eaten in months yet could spring into deadly action in a moment's notice. Details were still iffy but he knew he used to keep his hair short, so why did his stringy red hair grow so long and thick? Was all of this something these monsters had done to him, or had he simply been here for more time than he could imagine?

He was rudely snapped out of his thoughts by his would-be captors.

The first villain lunged at him like a wild animal, and the awakened man simply side-stepped the charge and kicked him on the rump as he passed by. The second tried to grab his blade, and paid for it with bloody hands and missing fingers as a result. The third tried to take advantage of the bodily confusion, and lost his head as a result; the blade he held seemed a lot sharper than it looked. He felt almost larger than life, almost like some sort of hero.

At which point it all came back to him. He was a hero! Or at least he tried to be. He was Russell Barnett, the college dropout formerly known as Gunner, formerly known as 8-Ball. He'd founded a team of heroes after meeting his notorious idol - and most of them died as a result of their inexperience. He then joined up with said idol in a group called the Universal Squad, but they were recently routed by a large group of their enemies, the so-called Calamity Conspiracy.

Washing ashore after being left for dead in the Pacific Ocean, Russell drifted for a time, feeling responsible for the loss of another group of heroes. Feeling no further use in going on, Russell almost jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, but was talked out of it at the last minute by a bald, wiry man professing the ability to help him find true meaning in life. True life in meaning, in fact. Confounded just enough to listen, Russell walked off with this strange, charismatic man.

This Clarence Davidson, representative of the Foundation of Ologyology.

The two talked for a time, and instead of killing himself, Russell decided to see what these clowns were all about; he'd heard they were some sort of organization dedicated to the betterment of humanity. He had been trying to help people, after all, but just didn't seem to be doing a very good job of it. Traveling to their New York City compound, Russell started to study their study of... well, study. A sort of methodology to reach the meaning of meaning, the base of all.

That seemed a far cry from sacrificing virgins. Or at least beautiful ladies.

Still missing some time, Russel decided he nonetheless knew enough, and surveyed the robed men surrounding him and his newfound 'friend'. They seemed interested in bringing him down alive if possible, though he imagined that being captured would, indeed, lead to a fate worse than death. When the cultists started to yell “Call the Master!”, he made his decision. Grabbing his would-be sacrifice by the arm, Russell charged in a direction that looked like it could lead to 'out', waving the blade in front of him madly as he did so.

This cleared just enough of a path for the two to get to the expensive, ancient wooden door before the cultists could rally and stop them. Shouldering his way through one of the doors with his sudden charge, Russell found that for some reason the door could be locked with a large, iron bar on the outside, as if to prevent something exceptionally strong from escaping. Grabbing this before force could be applied from within, he barred the door and made off with his mystery woman.

Russell surveyed the grounds of the family home, which had apparently gone into severe disrepair since his last time here. Sure Dad was in an asylum or a private investigator (or both) these days, and Mom never came back from Europe long enough to let him know about her latest husband, but ... there used to at least be People working here. You know, mowing the lawn, trimming the hedges, cleaning stuff... that kind of thing. But the dust buildup was quite large.

Everything was paid for with a family trust fund of course, so the place did still have power and water and what-have-you, but something had gone wrong. Or else Mom's people just weren't doing their jobs. Thinking this a mystery for later, Russell made for his secret lab, an underground bunker he'd built when he first decided to become a Super Hero. Situated under the family tool shed, no one knew about it before, and as he'd hoped, it sat untouched like everything else.

Of course, now Russell's new friend - who he eventually found out was Rebeccah, had followed him here out of fear, and thus knew of his secret workshop now, too. "What IS all this?" Shrugging, as secret identities (such as they are) didn't feel like such a big thing after the night he'd had, Russell told her. "It's my top secret Crime Fighting Apparatus." He waved his hand at rack after rack of electronic parts and semi-assembled bits.

"Mostly still in progress. Or... not, depending on how horribly they failed - like the force field thingie you're holding, there." Rebeccah raised an eyebrow at the charred, burnt out former-device on what might have been a flexible steel belt before it was melted beyond recognition, before putting it back down. "I see. So how does someone who's a big time Super Hero wind up working for a nutjob cult of devil worshipers or new age, sci-fi inspired boobs?"

"I'm just not very good at hero-ing, I guess." Russell then slumped to the ground, the gravity of what he'd almost done hitting him fully, another boulder of guilt added to the quarry he was already carrying about. Putting her hand on his head from above, Rebeccah tried to cheer him up a little. "You sure seemed like it to me - I mean, talk about a rescue with good timing. If you weren't one of the good guys, I imagine you wouldn't have shook off their brainwashing when you did."

Russell had a hard time denying that, despite his general pessimism. "Heh, true. You know -" Unable to complete his thought, both Russell and Rebeccah were startled when a computer panel in the secret lab started making noise - loud noise. Rushing to it, Russell fired up the monitor to see several people showing up on a radial motion detector... and approaching fast. "Hide behind something, we're about to have a lot of company... shouldn't have lingered here.

"Crap."

Brandishing the blade at the entrance to his 'secret' lab, Russell realized that hey, he's in his workshop. SOMEthing here has to be in working condition, right? Rifling through the bins of rubbish and sorta-finished stuff, he began to realize that his tendency to procrastinate was now a potentially lethal character flaw. This particle beam thingie would've been great had he FINISHED it. As would the matter transmitter hoochamajoob have been. And don't forget the death ray.

What self-respecting super genius doesn't have a death ray handy??

Hating himself, and hating the Ologyologists, and hating everything else with an acute level of detail he hadn't experienced before, Russell felt something 'click' in the back of his head. While just a moment ago he'd gazed on nothing but failures and setbacks, suddenly the workshop appeared to be a cornucopia of opportunity. Numbers and principles and theories and things he couldn't even recognize were running past his mind's eye, and suddenly...

Suddenly it all made sense. At least to Russell. Seeing her savior's eyes begin to emit an eerie cyan glow, Rebeccah backed further into the corner she'd ducked into when told to hide, suddenly very fearful for her imminent fate. "Russ? You okay in there?" But Russell was in his own world of strange technological nirvana, the true gift his father passed down to him. Sure there was the house and the money and all the stuff, but there were stranger things in the family tree.

And Russell had already used his newfound gift to perfect something that had simply boggled his mind but a year ago - assuming he hadn't lost even more time than he thought. Clicking what looked like six different lumps of VCR innards together with a bit of charred force field generator and something almost completely unidentifiable, Russell smirked. "Yeah. The field generator opens up energy paths to six different dimensions to fuel the wave effect, and -"

BWOOM! The door from the floor above exploded downward in tiny, smoking splinters, the blast leaving green trailers in Russell's eyes. Magic... bleh. His old teammate Devilroot used the stuff but it never hurt to look at. As the first two Ologyologists leapt down into his lair, Russell opened fire with the cobbled together technological terror. The thing emitted a wide, colorless beam of energy that, when faded, left naught but the smoking boots of his foes behind.

"Death ray, Bitches!"

As the weapon cycled up for another volley, a veritable conga line of Ologyologists followed the first two into the workshop, hoping to overwhelm Russell with sheer numbers. They came at him in a crowd, and before he could open fire and disintegrate the lot of them, Russell was bowled over by sheer momentum, at which point the gathered cultists simply held him down with their ample weight (both individually and en masse). Russell struggled against them futilely.

Once he'd been neutralized, another man entered Russell's sanctuary. While the others wore darker robes, this man was adorned in crimson, his own upside down Pi symbol sewn in fiery orange thread that seemed at first glance to dance as though alive. Shaved bald and appearing almost as wiry as himself, the villain walked atop his own minions and crouched over Russell's struggling face. "Fool. You would have lived on forever had you simply not failed us at the last moment.

"You could have served as the eternal vessel for mighty Ocpatex, in all his decadent glory! But no, you had to play the hero. And look where it's got you? Defeated and humiliated again. Just like when I found you, Russell Barnett." Looking closer, Russell could indeed see this was the man who recruited him into Ologyology in the first place. "Yes, fool, it is I, your savior - and now, the life I have saved will be the life I take - for the glory of Ocpatex!"

Binding him and leaving him on the ground, the Ologyologists threw Russell's cobbled together death ray on his chest, and painted their inverted Pi symbol all around him. As his minions drug Rebeccah away, no doubt for some insidious purpose or another, Russell's tormentor smirked and retrieved his magical blade. "Any last words before I pay you back for your ultimate betrayal, Barnett?" Looking up at his captor, Russell felt the hate wash over him again.

The sweet hate, the pure, undiluted wave of fury above and beyond anything he'd ever experienced in his life - even more powerful than before. "Yeah, Davidson, I got something to say. I'm screwed here, no doubt about it... but I'm not the only one!" His eyes flashing with an almost blinding burst of light, Russell turned his gaze to the death ray atop his chest, and willed the strange, multi-dimensional energy tap used to power it to overload.

"Nice knowing you, Clarence."

Before the cultist could flee, or even think to, the death ray exploded spectacularly, twisting space and time and a few other dimensions here or there, leaving naught but a strange, semi-spherical hole where the workshop and the shed above had formerly been. Investigating the strange crater, the remaining Ologyologists looked for their leader for a short time, and then drug Rebeccah off, content to be rid of Davidson and their foe.

It meant a likely promotion for one of them, at the very least...

* A lot of the historical details refer to events in Universal Squad #25, but are recapped enough that you don't need to necessarily have read it (which is good, since it's not polished yet - just like the 24 issues previous).

What do you mean, 'What do you mean, next issue?' Sure, Russell went and blew himself up real good, but you don't really think this is the end of things, now, do you? We're not here to write about the 'death of a hero', you can get that in any one of a number of fine comic book stores. This, here, is what we call a mysterious cliffhanger. You can guess that the man of the hour isn't dead yet, but how does he escape his explosive doom? Tune in next month to find out!

Hate Ball #1 (of 4) - Rebirtheded
Copyright 2007 Denny Hill 2 (firebomb@technohol.com)
All rights reserved and so forth.